Chinese Boxes
by 01cheers
Summary: In case you've read and liked Catching Up and wondered what happens next, you have a few people to thank for getting me to write a companion piece. This one is a different beast; more action than reflection, more shady alleys than shimmering mountaintops. And not a swatch of the Bat-cape in sight. But I hope that the heroes are still recognisably Bruce and Selina.
1. Intro

All the kind reviewers who commented on _Catching Up_ and those who asked about a continuation... thank you for tempting me, directly and indirectly. You all know who you are; the encouragement is yours, the flaws all mine.

This one will be more like 25K words than its predecessor's 15K, and I'll post slower than I did with the first one (sorry, work and the need for research are likely to get in the way), but I do have most of the plot figured out. Don't expect smut from me; I love reading it but the degree of pleasure I get from writing it is comparable to that derived from pulling teeth. Just trust me, they do fuck like minks when they have a chance. Finally, I mentally apologise to the country of China for making my bad guys Chinese... it was sort of inevitable with what plot facts from _Catching Up_ I had to go on as my starting point.

This one picks up at the exact point where _Catching Up_ ends, but I like keeping that one as a complete self-contained story. Don't be fooled by the fluff quotient in this first snippet; the first two or three chapters will be the proverbial calm before you know what.

.

xxx

They sit in the middle of the road, she in the shark-like Sesto, he facing her on the Harley, a subtler menace but a more manoeuvrable one. She kills the engine; he inches closer. She takes her hand off the wheel and rests her arms on it, leaning forward, glaring at him. He pulls off the helmet, shakes his hair loose, and returns her gaze, a male version of the Mona Lisa. The tableau continues for a few seconds; she can't get past him and he is definitely not about to change that. Finally, she pulls out the key and dangles it at him. Truce.

He drives the remaining five feet up to the window.

"Wanted to get some fresh air?"

When was it that she said these words; about thirty hours ago? How many lifetimes is that?

"Admit it, you have a thing for powerful bikes."

"And you have a thing for black Lamborghinis."

"You sure you don't want to leave your bike here and join me?"

He gives up, his shoulders shaking with silent laughter under the black suede bomber jacket. "Stop it, my belly is hurting. You look good," he adds, nodding at her outfit.

"I knew you'd like it." She doesn't even know how she managed to seemingly remember his every quip from yesterday to say back to him. Then again, so did he. "What's the plan?"

"The plan, until you started this excursion, was to find a place to eat. And now we have two problems."

"Namely?" she cocks an eyebrow at him.

"First, we are in two vehicles, which is... inconvenient. Second, you are overdressed for the occasion."

"I thought you said you liked my outfit," she quips, her expression that of a petulant teen.

"I like it _too much_."

"Ah," she answers with a sage nod. "So that means you'll want me to change before we make a spectacle."

"Would you rather change _after_?"

"On second thoughts... I don't suppose you've brought any money?"

"Afraid not. I was... otherwise preoccupied."

"Fine then, I am going back to the hotel for my purse and I'll meet you back at the villa..."

"How about we go back to the villa and I pick up a wallet and..."

"I am _not impressed_ by your millionaire attitude."

"I know you're not. That's why I am suggesting it."

She smiles in spite of herself. "Fine. On one condition."

"Namely?"

"Just for this once, we aren't racing. My reaction time is still messed up from last night."

"Don't worry, so is mine."

"And we swap. I want to try out this bike."

"That's _two _conditions."

"I can drop the first one."

"OK, I accept the two." He takes the keys from her, hands her the helmet and takes off the suede jacket to give her. "Don't even _think_ of stealing this one."

"No worries. I've got one of my own. As soon as I get my suitcase."

She makes it back up the winding road at a relatively sedate 50 mph... which would be fine if he hadn't been driving all the way right in front of her. In reverse.

xxx

The girls at the downtown boutique are used to bored Swiss housewives and under-dressed, middle-aged American tourists poking morosely at the size zero racks, not daring to ask how much larger the sizes go. It is hard to tell what piques their interest more, the sight of Bruce limping regally onto the scene wearing his suede bomber again, or of her strolling in wearing men's satin pyjamas, or the way the two of them shamelessly flirt as she tries on a few dresses.

She picks one, a simple cornflower blue shift, and holds it up to him against her body, poking out of the fitting booth.

"What do you think?"

"Nice."

"Wait, I'll try it on and show you how I look in it."

"I can already see you look better _out of_ it."

She notices that he is actually looking at the mirror behind her reflecting her stark naked back, and rolls her eyes. "Buying a dress for me doesn't mean you can get all _depraved_ on me."

"OK, tomorrow we come back downtown and you can buy something for _me_. And you can be as depraved as you may wish," he says after she has disappeared behind the curtain.

"Sounds good. I think I know what I'd like you to get."

"I'm curious."

"Something... really..." She pretends to muse on the subject. "...tight."

"On second thoughts," he reflects when she gets out to face him again, "I'll probably stick to doing my own shopping. It does look good," he adds, this time actually looking at the dress.

"Great." She shuts the curtain and throws the blue shift at him from behind it. "You go and pay for it, rich boy, so we can get out of here."

xxx

"So," he starts with what sounds like practised nonchalance, "what was the real reason you took off this afternoon?"

They are sitting at another monochrome locale; this one is actually pristine white, a lakeside restaurant halfway up the western shore of Lake Como. It turns out that the _one hour's drive away_ part can be safely cut by 50%, at least at the rate he drives.

She pretends to look at the surroundings; there is, in fact, plenty to admire. "Any guesses?"

"Obviously, something I did. No, something I _said_," he corrects himself, noticing the flicker on her face. "I just can't figure out what exactly it was."

"_Top three_?" she says in a distant voice, making big eyes at him. She decides to drop the _business partner_ thing; it's too tempting, upon reflection.

He chuckles in what looks like relief. "That was for Theo's benefit. The guy is pretty suspicious of sales talk and bullshit in general. If I'd said _the best_, he'd have thought I was exaggerating. This way I knew he'd believe me."

"OK, my bad," she concedes, covering his hand with hers. "Do I take it that I'll meet this bullshit-hating sidekick of yours at some point?"

"It's an open question who the sidekick is," Bruce counters with a smirk. "He's been in the company for eight plus years, and was with the Interpol before then. The guy's pretty good, even if I say it having hired him myself by phone interview. Of course you'll meet him."

"Does he have anything against thieves?" she cocks her head at him.

He shakes his head. "Not former ones," he replies with a mock-meaningful look. "Items of clothing don't count."

xxx

They are on their way back to Lugano when she puts a hand on his arm. "You know something..."

"What?" he shoots her a wary glance before looking back at the road; a sensible precaution at 100 mph.

"I was wondering if we could find someplace nearby to go see a movie. Make it into a classic date, you know."

She can practically see his shoulders relaxing. "Everything in Lugano closes at 9 pm, that's Switzerland for you. Try the town of Como, there should be a cinema in there." She looks it up on her phone; sure enough, there is. He takes the nearest exit to double back and return to Italy. "You realise, of course, that it's going to be in Italian?"

She stretches in her seat. "Who cares... besides, I want to start studying it."

"You want to get as close to having sex in a public place as we possibly can," he replies, not fooled.

"That, too."

"Pervert."

"Says the man who wore a bat costume every night – "

"Hey, I didn't wear it to – " he slams his hands on the wheel and has to slow down because he is laughing too hard. "OK, stop with the innuendo before I crash into something."

"All right, all right." She finally stops laughing herself. "Did you hear that they're going to make a Batman tribute movie now? The Dark Hero or something?"

The reference no longer puts him on edge, but it is still remarkable how he goes from amused to subdued in the space of two seconds. "I hope it isn't utter crap. And that whatever back story they have for the Batman it has nothing to do with the truth."

"You wouldn't want to see it?"

He seems to ponder it. "Don't know. I might, but then again, I've left it all in the past and I left the city in good hands." She wants to ask him who he means but figures that it can wait. "I don't know if I want to live it all over. There's always been too much... pain... as far back as I can remember. I don't think I want to go back to that."

She is both sorry and glad that she asked. "You don't have to." She reaches over and strokes his cheek. "And even if you wanted to, I won't let you. It's too nice over here," she adds in a purposely lighter tone. "I could get used to this."

"So could I."

It sounds like he means it. She hopes he does.

.

tbc


	2. Theodore Reimann and the art of bullshit

On with the show, dear readers, and much love for reviews, favourites, and follows :)

Still in the fluffy stage, I am afraid, but never fear, I am sharpening my torture instruments in the background. And I have to revise my story length estimate up from 25K. With an 8-page plot summary for the rest of it, I now suspect that the total will be more like 35K and fifteen or sixteen chapters. But I already know its last line.

BTW I apologise to fellow TDKR Bruce/Selina writers for not commenting on the wonderful fic that is posted here. I used to be able to read and write fic at the same time, but not anymore. I've developed a paranoia of picking up stuff and character voices, and am staying away from reading altogether until I am done. Any coincidences in circumstances or events are accidental hivemind.

Finally, I am not an OC-writing sort of gal. Still, I can't have Bruce running a company and not have him deal with its general manager, so in this chapter I need Selina to talk to Theo and set the scene as to their occasional future dealings.

.

xxx

"Stop worrying." She could swear he wasn't looking at her, watching the road. She has suggested they take the longer route to Wainwright Security offices, following the twists of the Carona road into town and then up into the hills to the northwest rather than take the lift down to the highway.

She could also swear she looks glacially calm. "Who's worried? I am perfectly relaxed."

"Is that why you're making fists?"

She looks down at her hands holding the bag strap in a death grip. So much for keeping up appearances.

"Easy for you to say. I've never had a job interview in my life. Or a boss."

"Guess what, neither have I." He ignores her dirty look. "And anyway, you're hired already. Theo may be the general manager, but I do own the company."

"I want to be a good hire on my own merit," she argues.

"Is this how you beg for compliments?"

She is tempted to reply with an obscenity, but just sighs instead, a picture of long-suffering patience. "Can you at least tell me a bit about this guy? Ex-Interpol, tolerates former thieves, hates sales talk and bullshit, what else?"

"Late forties, married with two small kids, half German-speaking Swiss, half Italian," he continues. "His parents must have been an odd couple."

Yeah, like a former billionaire and a jewel thief.

"What are you smirking at?" Her expression is obviously not lost on him.

"I know other odd ones."

He has the grace to smile before continuing. "I hired him a few months after I bought Integrated Alarms, hoping that he'd shake things up and drum up business, and he's done a stellar job. He hates making sales cold calls, but has enough contacts among fellow Interpol alumni who became private contractors. Those alone were enough to give us a respectable eight-figure bottom line the year after he joined, plus he reorganised the company into a structure that actually makes sense, plus as I said, Lucius and I anonymously furnished him with a supply line for the relevant Wayne technology. And he can put queries to Interpol databases through his colleagues who are still there, which is always a useful option, and he knows his stuff and is always curious about new inventions; and he loves tweaking the specs on equipment to make it perform better – he doesn't have the background to do it himself, but knows enough to ask Research for the right things." He picks up on her amused expression. "What's so funny?"

"Listening to you talk like a businessman," she confesses.

"Well, I _was_ one, at least one third of my time when I wasn't fooling around or... doing other things."

"How much does he know about all that?"

"Next to nothing. I've built up a credible history for Brandon Wainwright and as far as I know he hasn't seen through it yet."

"What did you tell him?"

"That I am a trust fund brat, grew up in a rich family, dropped out of Princeton, then travelled the world, did all sorts of crazy things, dabbled in the stock market, held a managerial position for a while, enjoy martial arts and _destroying fast vehicles_." He shoots her a sideways glance. "Nothing but the truth," he concludes, innocently.

"But not the _whole_ truth," she observes sarcastically. The memory of being on the receiving end of such treatment is too fresh in her mind; only three days ago this brute of a man told her exactly what had been happening to him, only to turn it on its head three hours later by supplying some previously-omitted additional information.

"No," he concedes.

"Ever thought of telling him the rest? I mean, if he is ex-Interpol, he'll figure it out sooner or later no matter what official records you've got in your current name, don't you think?"

Bruce does not reply immediately. From what she's seen so far, this does not so much mean that he has not thought about the question but rather that he has thought about it _a lot_ and is still struggling with the answer.

"He probably will, but I'm not going to make it happen sooner. I also want to stand _on my own merit_ with him, even if it's under a fake name, and not be judged based on how many billions I have inherited or given away."

For once, she thinks, he is not being fair on himself because of the money.

"Giving it away is a merit in itself."

"Maybe," he agrees, still sounding uncertain. "But I'd rather not advertise my dead identity to him. Besides," he continues in the sort of deadpan tone that means he is not entirely, or not at all serious, "if he puts two and two together and makes a connection between the demise of Bruce Wayne and the disappearance of a notorious Gotham vigilante, I'll _really_ never hear the end of it. The guy makes teasing me into a sport. It's the Italian in him."

"I like him already."

He keeps up the poker face. "Maybe I should retract that job offer. If the two of you team up on me– "

"You retract the offer, I tell him."

"You tell him, I'll tell him that you were one of the top _twenty, _not three. And I'll _swear_ upon it."

"And you think he'll believe you after finding out what a liar you are?"

"He _already_ thinks I am a liar," Bruce admits, serious now and clearly annoyed. "You have no idea how many times in the past two months I've heard _don't bullshit me Mr Wainwright _about things I've done_. _And the worst thing is, almost every time I was telling him the truth, but couldn't prove it without telling him who I was."

"So for now you keep up the pretence," she concludes.

"It isn't that much of a pretence," he counters. "There's plenty of what I am in it."

"Fair enough," she concedes. Maybe it's best if he really does not drag the old demons too close to the surface. "Now what should I tell him about myself?"

"The truth," he offers, unhelpfully.

"That I showed up and tied you up in your own bed and had my– " If Bruce can be unhelpful, so can she.

He does not answer at once, too busy biting the inside of his cheeks to look serious. "No, not _that_ part."

"Then what?"

"The _professional_ part," he manages.

"As in, stealing."

"Yes."

"And not a word about tying you–"

"No."

"He'll figure _that_ out, too," she observes sensibly, referring, of course, to the relationship in general rather than the particular episode. The way they still can't keep their eyes or hands off each other, they'd advertise it in no time.

"Of course he will. I just want to lead him on a bit," he admits. "Have my revenge for all the unfair _don't bullshit me_ that I've had to listen to."

"And you want me to play along."

"If you don't mind." There is just the tiniest hint of mischief in his face.

She mirrors his look as best she can. "I kind of wonder, though, if playing games with my future boss is a great way to get on his good side when I want him to like me."

He takes his eyes off the road to face her. "A guy you _want_ to like you has no chance. You had no such intentions with _m_e, and look at me."

She wasn't begging for this particular compliment, and it is a pretty underhand one as compliments go, but she likes it just fine.

xxx

"Theodore Reimann, known as Theo to family, friends and a few others who can get away with it," her future boss finishes, looking pointedly at Bruce. "You have the right by extension, Miss Caille."

"Céline," she answers as they shake hands.

The man is not what she expected. Perhaps she was expecting a sort of cross between Poirot and the Mario brothers, dark-haired and moustachioed, perhaps she reckoned he'd be portly and relatively short. Theo is almost the same height as Bruce and, if anything, a slimmer build, with somewhat narrower shoulders, short rapidly greying hair and shrewd grey eyes. _Always curious_, Bruce said; she can see it in his face, and she can see both the business potential and the mischief potential in it.

The three of them walk over to his airy corner office and sit around a coffee table, and she feels the tension seep away. "Mr Wainwright has said very intriguing things about you, Céline," Theo ventures. "I'd love to know more." They are speaking English, mostly for her benefit. Bruce told her that between the two of them, by now, they speak in a mixture of English and Italian, but while he has managed to go from near-beginner to fluent in the space of six weeks, _her_ Italian is still best described as embryonic.

She was expecting some degree of scrutiny, but she finds that when it comes in the guise of open curiosity like this, it does not put her on the defensive. "I can give you a short version; feel free to ask about anything you'd like to know more about." She hopes she won't need to dodge too many of those questions. "Canadian citizen, twenty-nine, lived most of my life in Gotham stealing jewellery and the like. Never got caught."

"Not true," Bruce corrects, helpfully.

"Never got caught by anyone _other than_ Mr Wainwright," she continues, flashing him a withering look.

"And never had any convictions, presumably?" Theo asks.

"That's a somewhat different question. I've had a conviction, but not for theft."

Across the table from her, Bruce looks up sharply.

"What for?" Theo asks, either oblivious to his boss's reaction or ignoring it... or playing into it.

"Kidnapping. I had an – acquaintance – who happened to be a Senator and who took a dim view of our... travel arrangements on one occasion." She is pointedly not looking at Bruce.

"That's quite a serious charge," Theo muses. At least he does not sound judgmental saying it. "How did you manage to avoid prison on it?"

"I didn't. I was in Blackgate Penitentiary in Gotham for a month until a riot broke the prisoners out." She sees Bruce sit up and stare at her. She forgot that this part is news to him.

Theo looks somewhere between stern and impressed. "With that sort of record, it will be difficult to get you clearance to request queries from Interpol databases if you need to," he concludes pensively.

"I wasn't there as Céline Caille," she reassures him.

Theo is obviously more of a pragmatist than a judge of morality, as he looks relieved. "Are you sure there is no way to collate the name you used with your current one?"

"None at all," she replies confidently.

"Sure?" Theo asks again.

"Absolutely," Bruce answers before she does, having recovered from the Blackgate news. "She's done her homework on that." Apparently, he is not willing to spread the _CleanSlate_ knowledge.

"With, I have to admit, Mr Wainwright's help," she observes, not quite looking at him.

"I'll run a check just in case, to make sure that they don't arrest you out of the blue," Theo insists. "But I hope you are both right."

"I _know_ I'm right," Bruce mutters smugly.

"The fact that I have found nothing on _you_, Brandon," Theo says all-too-innocently, "doesn't mean there isn't any."

"Doesn't mean there _is_ any," Bruce shoots back, unfazed. Selina tries not to laugh.

"And yet you say Céline is your business partner," Theo responds with a mock-accusing look.

"Actually, _my_ career in theft was far less spectacular than hers, and was over likely before hers had begun. And there is no record of it under anything resembling my name." Theo seems to let it slip, but Selina makes a mental note to ask him later; this is too good to pass up. "I was more of an…unwilling admirer… of her work," Bruce draws it out, his gaze playing over her face.

"As in, a mark," Theo corrects him.

"Precisely. She very cleverly relieved me of a few bi–" Selina can practically feel him bite his lip at the blunder. "bits of property," he continues so smoothly that Theo apparently does not notice. "And a string of pearls."

This does get the man's attention. "A string of pearls?" he repeats, looking at Selina's neck.

She offers him her most dazzling smile instead of an answer. It works, for now.

"What sort of safe did he keep them in?" Theo asks, changing tack.

"Diebold XT6800," she says with just a touch of false modesty.

"Impressive," Theo says simply. "How long did it take you?"

"Eight and a half minutes." No modesty this time.

"And presumably, your... proficiency... with other safe models is in line with this," Theo ventures. He does sound impressed.

"Most others take less. It depends on how much scoping and prep I am able to do, how much prior access to the site I can get, what sensors there are, I can work faster if there aren't any but usually–"

"That's precisely what I've been telling Brandon," Theo is too inspired by the concept to worry about interrupting her. "We get the technical specs on the equipment we buy from suppliers, for the most part we don't manufacture, except for specific hi-tech components, but what we buy is all lab tested separately under controlled conditions, or else we'll buy something and tweak it ourselves to improve it so that the resulting specs differ from OEM-declared ones, but again, all Research can do is lab test it. We have hackers by the dozen and circuit board technicians and camera mechanics, but not people who can field test the alarm systems half as well as an actual, well, burglar or – " he flicks a quick glance at her – "a _former_ burglar. Plus there's the whole issue of integration; if we're lucky we'll be asked to install new systems, but then there is a matter of selecting components that work together best, and very often clients will have something cobbled together that doesn't quite _work_ together, and they ask us to do something to make it better because they won't want to rip it all out and install something from scratch. And we need someone who has defeated these systems to tell us what the weak points are and how exactly they are bypassed, what the loopholes are where the sensitivity can be lowered versus the specs without the alarm picking it up, how the response trigger time can be minimised to always be less than the minimum time needed to disable the alarm. We have the researchers who are working on this, but what we need is testing and advice from a... practitioner."

The more she hears about it, the more like a challenge – and hence the more tempting – it seems. She can have the thrill of a caper every day; without the loot, granted, but also without the threat of a sentence.

"I'd definitely be interested."

"Good. Now if you don't mind, I'd start by assigning you as a consultant to the Integration team." Seeing no sign of opposition from her, he goes on: "I don't know how much Brandon has told you about company structure –"

Selina directs a look of manifest bewilderment at Bruce.

"Let me tell you quickly; I'll show you a chart later," Theo continues. For the most part, it's product divisions. Cameras, day and night, motion sensors, pressure sensors, heat sensors, RFID trackers, GPS trackers, and safe deposit boxes, though we only resell them, we don't make any. Then there's Research, which works across product lines. Their proprietary technology is mostly defence-related, which Brandon knows more about than I do" – Selina notices that Bruce does look pleased at the admission – "they mostly work on drones of various sizes, from what are basically small unmanned planes to spy cameras and microphones and sampling drones the size of a fly, we are a big contractor to the French and UK military for those, plus they also do the custom modifications and testing. And finally there is Integration that for obvious reasons also works across product lines, which I think would be the best place for you. And then there's Sales and various admin functions," he adds, almost dismissively. "Brandon and I do the high-level sales pitches, we sort of flip a coin and the loser has to do it, but the very basic accounts, like contracts for simple RFID tags, are taken care of by the sales team."

"Actually," Selina ventures, "seeing how both of you _love_ making sales pitches," she casts an amused eye at both her companions, "once I've been here long enough to know the products and the market, I could help you and Bruce out with some of those." She does her best not to smirk at their visible relief – and does not notice her own slip, which Theo promptly picks up on.

"Ah, there we are again." He is seemingly addressing the ceiling above the table. "So which is it, Bruce or Brandon?"

"You call me Bruce, I'll call you Florian," Bruce deadpans. "You see, Theo is not too fond of his middle name."

"I think it's a _great_ name," Selina says, no longer afraid to pick on Theo, "I think it's a deal."

"_Che stronzo_," Theo mutters, just above his breath, pointedly looking at the window.

"I heard that, Mr Reimann," Bruce retorts, pointedly not looking at him either. "Don't pick it up, it's pretty... _archaic_... Italian," he comments to Selina, doing his best to keep a straight face.

"Do you speak any Italian, Céline?" Theo asks, happy to change the subject.

"Not yet. I'm learning. Well, to tell you the truth I've just started, but I've already bought the textbooks and downloaded the audio files and am going through those." Well, at least in the time that your boss is not distracting me, she thinks, almost surprised that they seem to have pulled off the pretence of not being passionate lovers so far. "I am fluent in French, and Italian is similar enough to make it easier to learn."

"Excellent." Theo looks like he is about to slap her on the shoulder, then thinks better of it. "Most of our people speak English, but with Italian and French you'll speak half the Swiss languages already. I am not suggesting that you try learning Romansch, but I have a nephew who lives near St Moritz, just over an hour's drive from here, who would be happy to teach you German..."

She can't quite figure out if Theo means it seriously, or as the presumed romantic prospect that such introductions usually convey, or if he had figured everything out all along and was only looking for the best moment to cast the hook. But after the death glare that Bruce turns on him at this suggestion, there can be no doubt that he is no longer fooled, if he ever was.

xxx

"How did it go?" Selina asks him on the way from the office. They are once again going to Italy, Lake Maggiore this time, for dinner.

Bruce shakes his head. "He's in love with you." Seeing her incredulous look, he adds, "Don't worry, he is devoted to his wife and a family guy through and through."

"I shouldn't be the one to worry," she counters. "In that case, the feeling's mutual," she adds, lightly.

"So long as it's him and not his stupid nephew," Bruce says, seemingly to himself, "I have nothing to worry about."

"I'm _curious_ about the nephew," she insists.

"Twenty-five-year-old thrill-seeker, the first thing he did was challenge me to a motorbike race. With a Honda," he adds, condescendingly.

"Dare I ask who won?"

"You do."

"Of course," she taunts.

"Dare I ask why you never mentioned you were in Blackgate?"

She has to take a moment to gather her thoughts at this change of subject. Talk about throwing curveballs.

"There wasn't exactly time to compare notes," she retorts. "First you were busy getting killed, and now we've been busy... not getting killed. And it wasn't exactly the highlight of my life or career," she finishes dryly, noticing that he has been watching her face the whole time with an expression that looks suspiciously like concern. "But it wasn't really hell on earth, either. I've managed just fine." she adds, and sees his face soften a bit. "Which reminds me... what was that about _your_ less-than-spectacular career in theft?"

He turns his attention back to the road, but chuckles at the memory of whatever it was. "You'll love it. When I was travelling in Asia – Shanghai actually – I ran out of money and couldn't find any odd jobs for days, so I stole a crate of OEM circuit boards from a container at the port thinking I could quickly fence them. Guess what, I got caught as soon as I tried to sell the first batch and ended up in prison right at the border with beautiful Outer Mongolia," he smirks.

"Amateur," she teases. "Though I can't believe that the plaintiff pressed serious charges over a single crate if it was recovered."

"They didn't. The Chinese government did it for them, without their knowledge, even."

"Who were they?"

He takes a second to arrange his face into a serious expression. "Wayne Enterprises."

Once she has wiped away the tears of laughter, she remembers something else he said earlier that she had mentally bookmarked as a future question. "Is it true that you dropped out of Princeton?"

He takes two seconds to answer, staring straight ahead. "Yep."

"A typical billionaire CV," she quips – too soon before she notices how suddenly _quiet_ he is. "I'm sorry," she adds quickly, turning to him to put a hand on his shoulder, not sure what to make of it. It seems really strange that almost twenty years later, a generally very successful businessman and a legendary crime fighter should be concerned about his academic record, or angry at her for teasing him for it.

When at last he answers her, there is no anger in his voice, but he almost sounds as if he were in a trance. She'd _prefer_ it if he were angry at her. "After my sophomore year I came back to Gotham and to the manor, knowing that there'd be a hearing for...the man... who'd murdered my parents. I'd bought a gun and I was going to go into the courtroom and shoot him. I didn't care if they put me in prison for it, I just wanted him dead. But just when I was working up the nerve, someone else did it. They robbed me of my revenge and they – saved me, really. I didn't see it at the time, I was too angry. And I couldn't go back to university. Before I'd thought I'd be going to prison, and after that I saw no point in it. I just left Gotham and went overseas to try and make sense of life, and it took me seven years to make it back."

Like a modern-day Buddha, she thinks, but instead of enlightenment on that journey, he only found darkness.

"I'm glad you didn't kill him. Not that he didn't deserve to die."

"So am I. It made me think about what mattered more than revenge."

"What?"

"Doing what I could to stop good people from getting hurt. Especially from getting hurt because of me."

She does not answer, just keeps her hand on his arm until they arrive, wondering if the ghosts of the past will ever really go away.

xxx


	3. Inner Mongolia

Greetings from your Italy-based insomniac author ;) Time for the next bit now that I've typed it up. I swear, the more I write the longer the remaining plot summary gets ;) – I am at 10000 words of a summary right now (though it is really adding more details rather than altering the plot)

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xxx

She wouldn't have thought that regular employment could ever be fun, but she's been having a fantastic time for the past two weeks. Once her mostly-male colleagues got over, or pretended to get over the facts that the new alarm systems consultant was an accomplished ex-cat burglar, a very attractive female, and very definitely unavailable being the thinly veiled girlfriend of the company owner, things started settling into a pattern of daily challenges in the office, daily Italian practice (both Bruce and Theo were impressed with how seriously she took that resolution), and daily adventures, in bed and out, with Bruce. She could definitely get used to this.

And she wouldn't have thought that one of the first things company owners discussed with new employees were said employees' detailed views of vacation spots and long weekend getaways they wanted to visit in the immediate future. It helps, of course, when said company owner is sitting in a hot tub on the terrace of his villa trying to pull you in with him.

"Stop it." She looks stern, but does not move away. "You'll ruin my pyjamas."

"They're _yours_ now?" Bruce's reply is all mock indignation.

She pretends to consider the sky overhead. "You start living with a thief, you find that a few things change hands. Besides, you yourself said that items of clothing don't count."

This earns her a plunge in the tub, pyjamas and all. She does not mind one bit.

xxx

They've put together a list of destinations to go to in the coming year, though it is still a work in progress; she has not really travelled much beyond North America and now, Hong Kong and the Italian-Swiss border. As Selina Kyle, she often had reasons to want to avoid airport ID checks, depending on how dodgy her ID _du jour_ happened to be.

Now as Canadian Céline with a passport beyond reproach, she is looking forward to seeing Venice in a month's time in mid-June when the days are longest, Kyoto and Hanoi in early July before the rains start in earnest, Machu Picchu in springtime November, Sydney in summertime January and Rio for the Carnival… with another half-dozen options and a few tropical islands bounced back and forth in between. And, of course, Italy all over, considering that they are sitting right on the border.

His first destination in Italy is, somewhat conventionally, Florence. "I promised Alfred I'd be there in early June, before the tourists arrive," he reminds her, apparently thinking that he needs to justify the choice, when they are out of the tub and sitting on the terrace. "He knows I'm alive and well, and we deal with each other indirectly, but he had this particular wish that I really owe it to him to fulfil, and he picked the place. And I want to see him, even if we don't talk."

"Why wouldn't you talk?"

"He said he didn't want us to. I kind of hope that someday later we do. But for now, I suppose he wanted us to... let go of each other, of the history."

More the history than each other, Selina thinks, and she can't blame Alfred for wanting that.

"Then we can go to Venice for a week after that, and go to Liguria for long weekends in July and August when we aren't travelling."

"What's in Liguria?" Not that she wouldn't want to go, but she is curious to see what _he_ sees in it.

"Some pleasant little towns on the coast," he replies, a bit too vaguely for her liking. "Plus there's this Italian client of ours, Cassini, who has been inviting me to go kite surfing with him."

_That_, she thinks, is the more likely draw.

"Do you have a lot of thrill-seeker clients?" she inquires innocently.

"A few," he replies, coyly. "Though it's more the clients' kids in their late twenties and early thirties, the clients themselves tend to be too old for that. Cassini's an exception, he is about my age. And they're mostly into mountain sports here in Switzerland, skiing and climbing and paragliding and the like."

"And you're busy making friends with them."

"Something like that."

Not that she could begrudge him that. "Is Theo going kite surfing with you two?"

"He probably would, late forties and all," Bruce concedes. "But his wife would never forgive him if he went off on holiday and left her to deal with the kids. I hope _you_'d join us," he adds, in a rather obviously hopeful tone.

"I'll think about it," she makes it sound a lot less certain than she is. "Maybe you could also ask Theo if his nephew would be interested?" She tries to present it as a perfectly innocuous suggestion. That, not surprisingly, is met with a vaguely murderous stare for an answer.

"Anywhere else you want to go?" he asks a few seconds later, trying to change the subject; she is willing to let him. "I don't really need to be here for anything important between now and late June, and your hacker colleagues can survive a few days without ogling you. We could take a week off somewhere between now and Florence and see something else."

She is trying to come up with a more or less interesting idea when she remembers their mountaintop date of mixed messages and hidden agendas of two weeks ago, and decides that she _still_ wants to see his expression when she suggests it. "You know, the first time we had dinner at San Salvatore, when you started praising Outer Mongolia, I actually wanted to ask you if we could go there."

His expression, as it turns out, is one of faint regret. "Why didn't you?"

Because I thought you'd make some glib excuse and leave me looking silly. "I didn't know if I could trust your judgement back then, when you said it wasn't that bad."

"And now you do," he suggests, a bit too smugly for her taste, but she'll let it slip.

"I'm willing to give you the benefit of the doubt."

"When do you want to go? I have to go back to the clinic tomorrow but we can leave the day after."

She still doesn't really care if she sees Outer Mongolia, but seeing the excitement in his eyes, she is happy she asked.

xxx

No such luck, as they soon find out: a quick check of visa formalities shows that the modern-day state of Mongolia that lies, more or less, within the ancient Outer Mongolia borders, grants visa-free entry to Americans and a couple of dozen other nations... but neither Swiss nor Canadians. Selina is a bit disappointed, Bruce calls them _fucking bureaucrats_, and she is about to suggest that they go to Jordan instead when Bruce gives her that half joking, half challenging look and says, "But if you have a valid Chinese visa, we can go to _Inner_ Mongolia instead. As in, northern China. If you want to."

She _does_ have a Chinese visa, thanks to a couple of days spent in Shanghai as a short getaway from visa-free Hong Kong, and she _does_ want to, if only because it is hard not to be tempted when he is looking at her like that; and the next half day is spent in planning and phone calls to put together the logistics for what is now looking like a ten-day round trip from Lugano.

"We can charter a two-seater, or better still, a four-seater," he suggests, "that way we won't depend on commercial flights and big airports and won't have to drive around on the shitty roads there."

"Who will fly it?" she asks, only half joking; she is well aware of his proficiency with aircraft, but for anything officially chartered, the pilot needs to have a license specific to the type of craft being flown.

The question, perhaps not surprisingly, is met with a long disdainful stare.

"So much for joining the mile high club while the pilot's busy at the controls," she quips.

"It's overrated," he says matter-of-factly; she files away the knowledge for future teasing but does not retaliate immediately.

"Are you really sure you want to charter and fly a plane four thousand miles to China and back and while we're there?"

"I wouldn't do that. We'd spend a week just getting there," he corrects her. "We'll fly commercial to Beijing and charter it there. Anyway," he adds, looking uncharacteristically sheepish, "if we were talking about flying from _here_, I wouldn't need to _charter_ one."

"Don't tell me you –"

"I have a four-seater Cessna Skyhawk here, just for short trips in Europe. I don't fly it that much; I haven't really had time to, and now flying has become a major pain, with the detectors. I have to carry around a pile of X-rays and show it to the idiots at security to explain why I set off every single scanner. Besides," he adds, seeing her saddened expression, "I prefer the Sesto. But sometimes it's still fun to take the plane."

Boys and toys, indeed. If he can't have the Bat, he'll settle for a Skyhawk. "Is there any means of transport you do _not_ own?"

"A train," he readily replies. "Not directly, anyway. Also, to the best of my knowledge, I don't have a space shuttle."

"Which means that you _do_ have a boat somewhere," she concludes.

"Guilty as charged," he smirks at her. "A Falcon off the Ligurian coast."

So _that_'s the other big reason, other than kite-surfing, that he wants to go there for weekends.

"What, the boat you had an orgy with the Russian Ballet on?"

"No, it's a different one. That one was a sailing yacht, this one's a motor yacht. I sold the other one a couple of years ago and got this one. And it's technically Alfred's now. And it wasn't really an orgy," he adds, as an all-too-casual afterthought.

Well, that's something else to needle him with later. "Admit it, you wanted a faster boat."

He grins at her accusation. "Faster, and smaller. The other one was too big, really. I wanted something I could handle without a crew if I wanted to."

"How small?" She suspects that it is a very relative term.

"115 feet," comes another deliberately-casual reply.

"That's _tiny_," she comments, sarcastically.

"You should see the boats the Russians have," he counters.

"What, the ballerinas?"

"No, their boyfriends. I swear one of them has a boat four times as long. You are welcome to make all the appropriate remarks about overcompensating."

She wants to say that 115 feet isn't particularly short either, but lets him get away with it.

xxx

At daybreak three days later they land in Beijing. He has chartered another Skyhawk four-seater to go with his license, and they leave almost at once on a two-hour hop north to Xilinhot in the middle of Inner Mongolia. She takes in the view from the cockpit, the striped expanse of land beneath dotted with hills, the cotton wool of the clouds sailing by. It is good to just be flying alone with him and not have to save cities and outrun villains. She did not realise how much she has been looking forward to this.

In the end they only spend a couple of days in Inner Mongolia itself but they are a good couple of days. She has always been a city girl, by circumstance as much as, if not more than, by choice, and it all feels new – the endless grassy plains, the blue hills, the breeze, the horse rides, the quiet in the evening and the insanely starry nights. They don't talk much but they touch a lot. She is content to just soak in the sensation of peace, and, she suspects, so is he.

On the third afternoon they fly over the ruins of legendary Xanadu and a further 500-plus miles southwest to the mysterious 108 Dagobas, set in the desert in gleaming rows overlooking the Yellow River, on the border between Inner Mongolia and Ningxia. Early the following morning, after an overnight stay in the lively, leafy old town of Yinchuan, they fly further west, more or less following the Mongolian border, to the stunning, remote Jiayuguan Fort, once China's farthest western outpost on the Great Wall, sitting on a striking barren plain overlooking snow-capped mountains, and then continue further west to Turpan in Xinjiang. The next day they wander around the haunting Jiaohe abandoned city ruins and drive over toward Urumqi to spend a few hours on the shores of deep-turquoise Tian Chi, Heaven Lake, surrounded by meadows and pine forests and the towering Tian Shan peaks. She has never seen so much beauty and so much variety in so little time, and makes no attempt to hide her amazement. They walk, they take in the sights, they forget about the rest of the world. And they talk.

They don't ask each other questions; there is a time for that, and they've already asked each other a few and will keep doing so. After all, the two of them were complete strangers until they were briefly and fatefully brought together by circumstances so extreme that they will probably be the stuff of Gotham legend for centuries. And apart from the instant and continuing attraction, it takes getting to know each other, likes, dislikes, habits, moods, tastes, morals, whatnot, to really learn to live with each other. But part of that is just listening and not pushing or prying, and trying to understand.

He tells her about his life and travels in Asia, where he went and what happened and what he learned, the adventures and misadventures, the odd jobs and fights and discoveries and Chinese prison and training. He does not talk much about the months he spent in the Tibetan retreat, apart from the fact that he learned a lot of useful things from the wrong people. She wants to know more, but knows that the time for that is yet to come. He talks, briefly and with difficulty, about Rachel and the eight years after she died; the time for knowing more about that may _never_ come, but she also knows that she should let it be, should not try to open the Pandora's box of history until and unless he is ready to do so himself. And she finally works up the confidence to tell him about her younger years, confesses how she came to regard theft a thrilling escape from a dreary life and a guarantee that she wouldn't go hungry or have to sell her body for food, and is grateful when he listens and does not judge.

The more she learns of his history, the more she is struck by how much pain there is in it – and how a lot of it, at least on the surface, might seem avoidable. His destiny was shaped by childhood tragedy, but here is a man who could have had everything, who has so much intelligence and curiosity and, when he does not suppress it, so much lust for life – and who spent years turning himself into a weapon, then battling the underworld, then mourning something he never really had. In very different ways, they both have lost years of their lives doing questionable things, and she is both happy and not a little amazed that he is even able to contemplate, and set about building, a life beyond the cape.

On the second evening in Xinjiang, after he has told her about his prison stint in the province of Qinghai, between Mongolia and Tibet, and his long hike into Tibet and further on into Bhutan, she tells him that she would be curious to retrace his footsteps and they decide, almost on a whim, to do just that – figuratively speaking, as they would be flying rather than walking or hitchhiking – and go south toward the Bhutan border. And so on the afternoon of the next, the sixth day, they come back from Turpan to refuel at Jiayugun and fly a further two hours on to Xining, passing by Qinghai Hu, China 's largest lake, remote and eerie, with colourful Tibetan prayer flags on its shores. He chooses the less developed Xining rather than the more accessible and crowded Lanzhou on the banks of the Yellow River as their stopover point, allowing them to spend the next day looking at two magnificent monasteries located in the area before they fly a further 700 miles from Xining to Lhasa. They start with nearby Ta'er Si, a huge hillside temple complex dazzling with the golden roof of its great hall, and later fly southeast to Labrang Monastery in Xiahe with its dramatic mountain valley setting and its backdrop of almost-alpine mountains around Langmusi in the distance.

It has crept up on her before she even noticed. The better she gets to know him and the nicer he is to her, the more the beginnings of their history become an insidious torment. She cannot shake away the memory of having been an instrument of suffering for him; instead of going away, it burrows deeper into her mind. She knows that telling him about it will only invite dismissal, but ends up with a heavy suspicion that she has somehow been given this reward she does not deserve, that the day will come when she will have to pay both for her past deeds and for this unexpected happiness, and that he deserves someone better than her. Maybe, she argues in her thoughts, her purpose in his life is to help him enjoy it and protect him _from himself._ But whatever it is and whatever he thinks, one thing is clear. Selina, always a cool-headed and independent girl until he turned her life upside down, finds herself, for the first time in her adult existence, falling desperately in love, and knows that it is already too late to do anything about it.

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You may be familiar with my habit of sneaking in photo links. Here is another one that is somewhat relevant and not easily found: a few pics of an apartment above Lake Lugano for an idea of what I had in mind for the Carona villa, above all in terms of the terrace. I imagine it sleeker and more spacious, less 90-degree angles and more oblique, sloping lines, plus of course the hot tub, and definitely better furniture inside, but in this overall setting and style, even though this apartment sits on the "wrong" side of Lugano, on Monte Bré. I just wanted to convey the general sense. Replace asterisks with dots.

(http www) interhome*ch/english/switzerland/ticino/lugano+aldesago/ch6974.300.1

And here is an indoor pic of another villa that looks about right: (http) i47*tinypic*com/14sprb9*jpg.

Also, as the principal instigator of this sequel knows, the original plan was to have them travel to Outer Mongolia ; but the Mongolian authorities are, in fact, to blame for changing the couple's travel plans ;) My remarks on the Mongolian, Hong Kong , and Chinese visa regimes may seem contrived but reflect the real state of affairs. Likewise, the implied Cessna travel times and distances in China are real.


	4. Of shit and fans, part one

What can I say? I'm a cheat. This is in fact _half_ a chapter, but since I've written it and am going out now, I am posting it as otherwise it will sit in my head and not leave me in peace all evening. Besides, it gives me a chance to sneak in a nice cliffhanger for once; with my usual long chapters, I am my own worst enemy when it comes to leaving things at an interesting juncture. Maybe I'll turn evil from now on and post the thing in 1,000-word bits with a cliffhanger at the end of each one :P

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xxx

Bruce is usually restrained, or at least _concise_, when it comes to swearing. So when, after talking to the controller in Chinese, he hisses an extensive and almost exclusively four-letter invective at the Xining air traffic control, she knows that there is a reason for it.

"Something wrong?" She tries her best to sound casual.

"Fucker's not letting us land," Bruce snaps. "Says we must keep circling. Says there is an incident on the runway because a Boeing has just cocked up its landing because of fucking hail on the runway and he has a queue of passenger jets."

They checked the weather before taking off in the morning, and again before leaving Xiahe. She has enough confidence in Bruce's fluency in Chinese to believe it when he says, in between expletives, that the forecast contained nothing more menacing than _scattered thunderstorms_. Which the shit they are looking at resembles in name only, with 100 mph wind gusts and something that looks and sounds decidedly like hail. For now they are observing it from a relatively safe distance, but having had to do three circles wide enough to steer clear of the storm after they were already on approach, they are running out of options, and the controller does not seem to care.

"We have forty minutes' fuel left," he says in a flat tone. She does not know enough about flying to know if it is good or bad, but assumes from looking at him that it is the latter.

"Anything I can do?" She keeps her own voice level and matter-of-fact. She is not even scared; well, she certainly is, but somewhere in the crazy corner of her mind that seems to have grown a good deal lately, she thinks that there could be worse ways to die than here, five thousand feet up in the sky and looking at him. Maybe there is a point to the whole _live fast, die young, leave a pretty corpse _thing.

Luckily for her, her pilot is much more practical thinking about the landing.

"Take a look on here." He pulls out the tablet holding flight maps and hands it to her. "See if you can find an airstrip within a fifty-mile radius."

She does her best to stay calm and look, if only to be helpful. A minute or so later, she holds the tablet for him to see. "Check it out. I've found this one but it's not marked as an operational airfield."

He looks away from the controls long enough to scan the satellite view. "Right. No wonder it's been shut down, there was a major quake in this area four years ago. They've refurbished Xining airport and repaved the runway but they wouldn't have bothered with something as small as this forty miles away in a seismic zone and right under the mountain ridge. Can't believe they built it there in the first place."

"Can we still land on it?"

He scowls. "We can, but we'll be landing on visual only. There's no one to give us an approach vector and landing guidance. And there's no telling exactly how bad the runway is. But it's doable. The upside is, there won't be anyone else landing there so we'll have it to ourselves."

"I guess it's the best we have," she ventures.

"I guess so," he says between his teeth. He likes it far less than she does, and she suspects that it is because of her being there. God knows what crazy shit he's pulled on his own. "We won't know until we're there."

It doesn't look disastrously bad on the recon pass they are making before settling on the approach vector. The runway looks smooth; it's almost as if it had been maintained. Bruce is initially pleased to see it; she cannot immediately see what suddenly makes him change his mind.

"Anything wrong?" she asks a second time in half an hour.

"I don't like this," he states grimly. That much is obvious.

"What?"

"The radar." He points to a white dot in the distance, far below on the ground ahead of them. "It's working." Peering ahead, she can just about see the top of the array spinning.

"Maybe the map's old," she offers. "Maybe they've restored and reopened it since."

"I rechecked the local flight maps for updates before we left Turpan two days ago," he argues. "They were dated end of April. There's no way it would have changed in a month." He lets out his breath in a hiss. "The more likely scenario is, it's something dirty."

"Dirty?" she echoes.

"Drugs," he explains. "They could be growing opium poppy at the foot of the mountains. Would explain their desire to repave the strip in this location."

Fuck.

"You don't think we could pay them off," she wonders aloud. They have a duffle bag of 100-yuan banknotes hidden under the back seat of the plane, money they have been using to pay for refuelling – "that way we get much faster service than we would with a credit card," he explained to her – and still have about three hundred thousand yuan, thirty thousand euros' worth, left, leaving them a cushion for emergencies. "Give them a hundred thousand and say we were never there?"

"If this is the Triad," he counters grimly, "they'll take all that there is and the plane and there won't be enough left of our bodies to identify. They are beyond paranoid, now that the government is cornering them and they retreat into the wilderness. If we were on a more equal footing, in a built-up area or at least on uneven terrain, I could do something, take out enough of them so we could outrun the rest. But we have no fuel and we're literally going to be a sitting duck the moment we land."

She can't fault his logic. But she is not sure that they have conclusive evidence yet.

"I'm not going dumb and delirious on you, but there's still a chance that it's something legit or at least non-Triad," she offers, not really convincing even herself.

"What the fuck – " he snaps, and before she has time to wonder if he has lost patience with her, he goes on, peering ahead and to the left of the runway, "I can't believe they built a –"

At that moment, the comm relay hisses to life, the static quickly replaced by a gruff Chinese voice.

Bruce shoots her a quick look. "Listen, if we don't get a chance to talk until later, there are three things I need you to do."

"What?" she asks, startled by this turn of events and the change in his countenance, not knowing what to expect.

"Hide your Canadian passport below the dash as far as you can stick it, speak Italian, and act stupid."

She has no idea what this means, but says "sure" just as he switches over the comm and answers the query, by now repeated, in Chinese.

xxx

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I was looking forward to posting this next link. Not a photo, but a song that perfectly sums up the tone of this scene… or this fic, for that matter. If you are familiar with Warren Zevon's _Lawyers, Guns, and Money_, you know what I mean. If not, here is the video (http www) youtube*com/watch?v=S5puAN1PGQw and here are the lyrics (http www) davemcnally*com/lyrics/warrenzevon/lawyersgunsandmoney*asp– asterisks stand for dots, as always ;)

And the part about Xining being in a seismic zone is true.


	5. Getaway

Here is the final part of the sequence that started in the previous chapter. Now that I am 100% done with writing the plot outline, I figure that the total will be 18 chapters instead of the original 15-16, and something like 40K words. It's still the same overall amount of story, though.

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Bruce is still talking to the controller, or to whoever the man on the other end of the conversation is, when it occurs to her that they may, after all, need bribe money. She twists in her seat as far as she can to lift the back seat cushion, drags the duffle bag from under it, pulls it into her lap, and takes out four rolls of notes, 5000 yuan or about 500 euro in each, offering them to him before replacing the bag. He nods in gratitude – the conversation and the descent manoeuvres do not really allow him to direct his attention to other things – and stuffs the notes into the pockets of his bomber, this one made of leather but still predictably black. But he does not seem interested in hiding his passport.

Instead he grabs the tablet holding the flight maps and hurriedly types something on it with one hand before passing it to her. She looks at the notepad memo he opened: _delete our flight plans_. She has a moment of panic thinking how she can find them, leave alone delete them, before calling up the file manager and seeing the directory. Once the files are purged from trash, she cancels the memo and looks at him for further instructions; he motions for her to give him the tablet and runs a command on it, briefly glancing at the screen while steering the plane with one hand. Whatever it is, the program appears to crash the tablet, and she wonders whether it was intentional before a sideways glance at him shows her his satisfied expression.

He spends most of the final approach on the radio with the controller, keeping his voice so calm it's almost casual, but she sees the tension in the sharpened lines of his face. Whatever he is saying seems to work, for the moment: the other man started in a tone that sounded distinctly put out but, while still apparently displeased, has decided to let them land: judging by Bruce's reaction to what he is saying, he is giving them landing instructions. Contrary to procedure, the controller cuts off when they touch down – but then they _are_ landing on an empty strip and there are no other craft to watch out for or parking spots to be directed to – leaving the cabin suddenly quiet save for the whine of the engine slowing down. This may be their last chance to talk; there is too much to say and none of it is appropriate for the moment.

"Don't switch on your phone." As usual, Bruce goes for the practical side. "We have better chances if they don't worry about anyone locating us via GPS. We could be dead by the time they locate us, anyway."

She _OK_'s her acknowledgement as they slow down a couple of hundred feet before the end of the runway, fifty or so feet away from the squat concrete building of a rudimentary terminal. The place looks eerily empty as they sit there waiting for some sign of human presence other than the disembodied controller of a few minutes ago.

He turns to her and looks at her in a way that makes her throat ache in sympathy. "I'm sorry."

"Don't be," she replies steadily. Whatever this may lead to, she has no regrets about having made it this far.

Two seconds later, the terminal doors open to spit out half a dozen men in uniform.

"Cops or military?" she asks while the group is walking up to the Cessna.

"Look like Armed Police," he says, his voice uncertain.

"Can they tag you with fingerprints to show your previous arrest?"

"No. They aren't really –" he cuts himself off and motions for her to open the passenger door, seeing how the men are gesturing for them to get out.

xxx

The cops or whoever they are motion them out of the plane but do not handcuff them; a good thing already, she thinks. There are guns on display, handguns in holsters and AK47s held in a discreetly menacing way by two of the men, but for now, they are just standing on the runway and talking.

And even without knowing a word of Chinese, she can tell that Bruce is giving an Oscar-worthy performance.

She was amazed at the sudden change in his expression and manner the moment he turned away from her to open the door. It is as if the problem had suddenly resolved itself, or had never even existed. Here was a man so relaxed, so unperturbed, that had she not seen him seconds earlier she would have never believed such a change possible. And here she was, thinking _she_ had been an accomplished actress. If anything, he looks slightly lost, but still with an air of someone who managed to take a wrong turn in his own manor house.

It seems to be working, at least in the sense of not getting them shot. Initially they all ignore her standing next to him while the presumable highest ranking officer is questioning him; then, seeing Bruce steal a glance at her, she figures it is her turn to contribute.

"_Amore,_" she drawls in her best fake cooing voice and her best Italian accent. "_Cosa sta succedendo?_

"_Tutto a posto, cara_," he replies smoothly before turning his attention back to his Chinese interrogator, and she wonders how much truth there is in his reply. Is he saying that everything is OK as part of his performance, or does he mean it?

A minute later, she turns to him again. "_Amore, questo non mi piace, ho paura."_

"_Non preoccuparti cara, stai tranquilla._" This time he actually touches her arm to reinforce the soothing message. No one stops him from doing it; so far, so good.

The conversation continues, a stream of sharp singsong syllables in an unfamiliar language. She cannot possibly hope to make any sense of it – except at one point she seems to hear Bruce mention an Italian name, Giacomo something, presumably tying in with her pretend identity.

She decides to try a different tack. After all, he did tell her to act stupid.

"_Tesoro,_ _possiamo pagarli per andare via?_"

"_Si, si, sto per farlo_," he answers quickly, as if irritated by her pestering him. But to her, this is the most decisively encouraging message so far: if he acknowledges, albeit in a language the cops presumably do not understand, that he is about to pay them off so they let the two of them go, it really must mean that they are off the hook.

And so it seems. They walk over to the terminal – no guns trained on them – and Bruce shows the cops his Swiss passport and signs some sort of papers and gives them two of the money rolls from his pockets apparently under the pretence of an official payment, and after about ten minutes' wait, she sees a refuelling truck pull up to the Cessna from behind the terminal, and they are led back to the plane for Bruce to open the fuel tank. After a few more minutes the tank is sealed again, the truck pulls away, the cops wave them on – impatiently, it seems to her – and miraculously, they get back onto the plane not only alive but with only half of their intended bribe paid and with fuel in the tank. They taxi into takeoff position on the runway and, following the surly controller's instructions once more, take off into the beginnings of dusk.

It is almost anticlimactic. Something that seemed like mortal peril an hour ago looks now to have been little more than an unusual refuelling stop, not that she isn't happy about it. In fact she is too bewildered by their good luck to be capable of an immediate reaction. It is only when they are a few hundred feet off the ground and a couple of miles from the airstrip that she steals a glance at Bruce and sees how utterly exhausted he looks.

"You OK?" With the past hour's happenings, it was easy to forget that their troubles – specifically, _his_ troubles as the pilot – actually started almost _three_ hours ago and included the near miss of running out of fuel while airborne.

"Yeah." He sounds like he means it, if rather downbeat. "You?"

"Fine," she answers with a shrug. "Correct me if I'm wrong, but we seem to have got away with it."

"Looks like it." He sounds like he doesn't want to discuss it at the moment, the fatigue seeping into his voice. "Now, where do you want to go? I don't think it makes sense to return to Xining. We can head back toward Beijing, or we can still try to go to Lhasa but in either case we need to stop overnight and refuel in the morning. We only have half a tank."

She feels slightly guilty about insisting on sticking to their plan seeing how preoccupied he is, but does not feel like spending the last two days of their trip in a huge crowded city. Besides, he _is_ offering her a choice, and they can sleep until late tomorrow if they want to.

"Is it OK if we still go to Lhasa?"

"Of course it's OK." For once he sounds nearly upbeat. "I have to warn you, our stopover point tonight will be something of a shithole. But I didn't feel like pushing my luck and asking for a full tank when my stated destination only needed half."

"So long as we get a bed, I'm sure we'll live," she offers, as he veers the plane to go west. She wants to know more about what just happened and especially about what seems to have left him unhappy about it, but it can wait.

xxx

Her patience pays off the following morning. By the time they take off from rather desolate Golmud – she has to agree with Bruce on his less-then-favourable opinion of their overnight stopover point – they are both well-rested; for once they spent all their time in bed just sleeping, too drained by the evening's misadventure. Bruce seems to be in better spirits; and when she asks him what exactly happened at the airstrip the previous afternoon, he eventually gives her a full account.

"Basically, I played clueless bordering on brain dead. I've had a lot of practice at it," he adds, noticing her quizzically raised eyebrow.

You and me both, she thinks. "And the cops went for it."

"They weren't cops."

"Armed Police, whoever."

"They weren't police at all. They did a good job with the uniforms, probably stole some and made copies, but they had Russian-made AK47s, without a bayonet. The real Chinese Armed Police use the Type 56, it's a locally made version that has the bayonet attached, or a QBZ-95. I suppose they couldn't get their hands on genuine PAP weapons and figured most people wouldn't think about such things when looking at assault rifles."

Well, _I_ sure wouldn't, she thinks. She _would_ think about how to overpower or outrun the guards, but not about the finer points of rifle accessories.

"As soon as I saw that, I figured that _a_, they wanted us or any other visitors to think they were legit, and _b_, they could be bribed."

So _that_'s part of the reason he looked so relaxed when talking to these people, AK47s and all. Still doesn't explain why he was so downbeat afterwards, though.

"And they were happy to see that we were foreigners," he continues. "The controller couldn't tell I wasn't Chinese, so they had no advance notice."

"Why did you tell me to speak Italian?"

"I suppose I could have asked you to speak French, but it made more sense to pick a language we _both_ speak."

"Why not English?"

"Same reason as I told you to hide your passport. Anyone English-speaking snooping around in these parts will make them think they're CIA, or worse, DEA. And Canada is notorious to them for issuing passports to CIA agents on undercover assignments. If they saw your passport and heard you speak English, it would scream Langley to them."

"But _you_ have an English-sounding name in your passport and they saw it."

"In a _Swiss_ passport, mind you. The Swiss aren't exactly known for leading the international law enforcement effort. They probably figured I had a few things to hide with a passport like that."

And you sure do, she smirks to herself. "So you said I was Swiss too?"

"Italian, actually. The story I told them was that I was here on an associate's business. I had to tell them there was a business reason for the trip, or they'd never believe we were in Qinghai on holiday when foreigners never really come here. I gave them a name of an Italian client of ours who I knew has Chinese partners in his company in Italy and a small stake in a local yarn producer in Chengdu, less than 400 miles south of here in Sichuan. I figured he'd bear me out if it came to calling him to check our credentials, and my Chinese would explain to them why he took me on as an associate." So that's who the Giacomo guy must have been. "I told them that we were flying to Chengdu from Beijing, that you were his future daughter-in-law also involved in the business and had an affair with me in the meantime, and that I'd chartered the plane to impress you with my flying and get us some privacy," he flashes her a mischievous look, "and I didn't want my business partner to know that his son's fiancée was cheating on her future husband with me, so I was anxious to keep your presence quiet from him. I figured if they did call him, he'd recognise my name and say the right thing, but he wouldn't know the first thing to say about you. And since Beijing to Chengdu is 1000 miles and beyond the Cessna's range, I had to stop and refuel. You'd erased our real flight plans and I made it look like the tablet crashed to explain why we hadn't saved any, so I could tell them that my original plan was to fly from Beijing to Xi'an, on a straight line to Chengdu, but Xi'an International was too busy and I had to go to the alternative airport, which in this case was Lanzhou, which in turn was busy receiving redirected traffic from Xining, which we knew was not letting us land, and we were flying on fumes and were desperate to land anywhere and pay anything for the half a tank needed to get us to Chengdu."

She is impressed, in retrospect, by his ability to construct a flawlessly coherent cover story in what must have been a few seconds after he heard the controller and before he told her to speak Italian. "I thought we'd end up giving them more money to let us go."

"They wanted it to look official. I paid them about five times the going rate for fuel, anyway."

"Which was still a hell of a lot less than we could have lost," she admits. "What's this Giacomo guy like?" Part of her reason for asking it is to see if it gets him jealous; ever since she discovered that particular trait of his, it has been a gift that keeps on giving. If this doesn't work, she'll proceed to needle him about the guy's son she was supposed to be engaged to.

But rather than look jealous or annoyed or amused, he looks dejected, just like the previous evening. "I shouldn't have mentioned him. Name's Giacomo Varese, he asked us to install surveillance systems a couple of months ago, it was one of the first jobs I remember tackling with Theo after I got out of hospital and came to Lugano. He seemed worried, and wanted top-of-the range surveillance for his home but none for his business, which seemed strange. I figured he'd probably received threats from the Mafia, but he didn't say and I didn't push him. I had no right to invoke a client here." He shakes his head. "But I wanted to be sure they'd believe us and wouldn't mess with us." Wouldn't mess with _me_, she thinks, knowing perfectly well that Bruce would have managed to get out of this even without a cover story. But he looks too miserable already for her to call him out on his over-protectiveness.

"Chances are, he'll never know and they'll never remember. Maybe they're just a small outfit producing fake Gucci bags."

He looks anything but convinced. "Not likely."

"What is it that worries you?"

He takes his eyes off the instruments for a few seconds, but does not quite look at her. "Just before we started the landing procedure, when the controller called out to me, we were flying over the northwest end of the strip. The way he directed us to the landing, we never passed that side again until we landed and couldn't see beyond the foothills. But I'm positive that what I saw in the valley over there was a chemical plant. Not a meth lab but a serious thing, reactor tanks, storage tanks, the whole nine yards. In a seismic area, mind you, that had a major quake four years ago and two 5-magnitude quakes this year alone, and hundreds of miles away from any big industrial zones. And it looked to be in perfect working order."

.

Before you suspect me of starting to randomly write passages in Italian ;) I can assure you that I'll do my best to explain anything Italian that is important to the plot (as I tried here) – the only "unexplained" words are likely to be commonplace greetings etc (e.g. _ciao, come va, tutto bene_) or swearwords (_stronzo_ etc). But if my translations/comments seem confusing or you are curious about the meaning of a particular expression, let me know.


	6. Déjà vu

I want once again to thank the lovely readers for the reviews, both on Catching Up and on this one. It might be tempting to make a list and thank everyone, but it is tricky as I am grateful to logged-in reviewers and guests alike. It is incredible fun to be playing in this plot, and you keep me motivated to type up the chapters. I should, however, give a special shout-out to Abelard, whose subtle persuasion was the last drop that convinced me to write this sequel and who specifically suggested that skeptical Bruce give the mile high club another shot. The second paragraph of this chapter, the last unadulterated-fluffy interlude until _much_ later on, was the least I could do ;)

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She is not surprised when he asks her, on the evening of the first day they spent in Lhasa getting lost in the Potala Palace and wandering around the town and its fabled temples, if she would be OK with a half-day stopover in Hong Kong, after they complete the local monastery tour tomorrow afternoon and fly to Beijing, or rather Lanzhou to stay overnight before arriving in Beijing on the last day of their trip, so he can drop by the Wainwright Security rep office. She knows the reason full well; they are enjoying their time in Lhasa but she can see it, hear it, in his subdued voice and the fleeting dull look in his eyes; he cannot let go of the remote valley west of Xining, with its deserted airstrip and fake Armed Police and sinister-looking chemical plant. She wants to argue, to tell him that it is none of their business, but she knows it to be useless. Going to the Hong Kong office and running a query may be the lesser evil in the end; with any luck, he will either discover the damned thing to be less of a threat than he thought, or if it turns out to be big, will alert the Chinese authorities to its existence and let them deal with it. She tries to think of the likely outcome in these binary terms, and not dwell on what other scenarios may crop up.

On the plus side, neither of them is eager to fly commercial on the typically-full three-hour flight, so after they've changed their long-haul flight departure point and time from Beijing late in the morning to Hong Kong late in the evening and have landed in Beijing in the early afternoon, they immediately board an executive charter jet to travel the three hours in relative luxury. By the time the door closes and the plane begins taxiing, the much-delayed adrenaline rush from their lucky escape outside Xining catches up with her, and Bruce is only too willing – or rather, all too eager – to play along. They send away the hostess to the pilots' cabin, and the moment they hear the cabin door shut, he pulls her into his lap and gets his hands under her clothes. They are only marginally embarrassed when they are discovered, sleepy and tousled and distinctly underdressed, in a heap of blankets on the leather couch when the plane begins its descent over Lantau; and when questioned about it now, Bruce has to admit that his previously indifferent opinion of the mile high club was entirely a function of his fellow travellers at the time.

Wainwright Security occupies a total of five rooms on the vertiginous 85th floor of the gleaming Two IFC Tower in Hong Kong Central near the Star Ferry terminal. Bruce had no intention of making a big deal of his visit – he just needed an hour or so to talk to Chen, the chief representative, run a quick online search, and call Theo from a room where he could look at a decent-sized computer screen while talking – but once the other staff, all three of them, get the news that the mythical Mr Wainwright not only exists but is actually sitting in their boss's office, they all find pretexts to poke into that office at the close of the business day. Huang and Zhou, the existing and new contract managers, suddenly need advice on how to deal with tricky negotiations, and Lin the executive assistant, the sweet, willowy girl who packed and brought Selina's suitcase to Lugano but only met Selina herself while Bruce was off taking to Theo in the review meeting he had unceremoniously skipped on the day of their dinner date, sneaks in, with a million apologies, under the pretence of saying hello to Selina. Bruce plays along and is nice to all of them, even if Selina suspects that he'd rather get down to business with Chen. Eventually they are left in peace; Selina herself feels like an interloper, unable to contribute much to a discussion of the Chinese criminal world, but when she suggests that she might take a walk downtown so as not to be in the way, Bruce says "sure, if you'd like to" and looks at her in a way that suggests that _he_ likes watching her right there, and she thinks that she has pretty much seen all of Hong Kong in any case.

The search and subsequent discussion achieve little besides partially vindicating Bruce's assertion of having seen a chemical plant. It is, in fact, officially mapped and listed as Gonghe Rongbaolin, a chemical pulp mill, a producer of unbleached kraft pulp and cardboard, illogical as it may be in a sparsely forested area when most of China's pulp mills are a good thousand miles further south. There is even a single-page website, a crude, garishly coloured page with a bullet-point list of products and contact details. The airstrip is still listed as closed in every source they encounter; there is no point in transporting cardboard by air anyway, so it is not even clear if there is a connection between the strip and the mill. Chen says that he can try doing a more extensive search in business directories and official financial reporting databases to see who Rongbaolin belongs to and what sort financials it boasts, but this, by definition, would take time. To make sure they leave no stone unturned, Bruce calls Theo on the conference table speakerphone, gets an earful of calm but excruciatingly sarcastic mockery about how much his general manager appreciates being urgently pulled out of an important sales pitch meeting to discuss the nuances of the Chinese pulp and paper industry, retaliates with pointed and patently fake admiration of Theo's love of sales talk, and secures a promise that Theo will see if he can pull strings at the Interpol to find out if the location has ever been mentioned in any of the information-seeking blue notices, arrest-warrant red notices, or any reports on organised crime, drug production, or failing that, environmental crime. There seems little else to be done; they just have a couple of hours for a quiet dinner before heading to Lantau for their 11 pm flight. How strange life is sometimes. A mere month ago, she left Hong Kong on the very same flight to Zurich, anxious and hopeful, not sure what to expect but unable to resist the draw of seeing a man she had once betrayed and then mourned for dead. And here she is now, about to board it with him.

They walk out of Chen's room; it is almost seven, but Lin, who usually leaves at six sharp to Theo's regular time zone-related frustration, is still there, apparently typing up a memo she forgot about. Selina tries not to smile, noticing the girl steal lingering looks at her admittedly gorgeous boyfriend.

"One more thing," Bruce says to Chen, oblivious to Lin's attention, "could you run a detailed search on suspected Triad assets in Qinghai and see if you can cross-reference the coordinates? Maybe the the airfield comes up under a codename? Or maybe they have something else in the vicinity?"

"I'll see what I can do." To Selina's benefit, Chen prefers speaking English when he can, accented though it is versus Bruce's near-native Chinese – he does not often get a chance to practice. "They aren't doing well, fortunately. At least here in Hong Kong they aren't," he corrects himself.

"Hong Kong is still Lau's sandbox, isn't it?" Bruce says, absent-mindedly.

Selina has no idea who Lau is, and why this is met with peals of laughter from both Chen and Lin.

"You must have been studying ancient history, Mr Wainwright," Chen says, still chuckling. "Lau's business never recovered after he was snatched into mid-air by a flying ninja dressed as a bat and taken to Gotham City for questioning, almost ten years ago. He came back eventually, but his empire was finished. And then they had to sell their building two blocks from here to an American insurance company. Imagine the humiliation."

Bruce does his best to act like he is embarrassed by his memory lapse and amused by the details, but she notices him looking anxiously around the room, thinking of a way to change the subject. She remembers his seemingly-offhand comments to her about his last Hong Kong trip before this one, halfway around the world on the top of San Salvatore: _interesting enough to be a pleasure; a thrill ride, anyway_. And he managed to get so distracted now as to forget its consequences. She tries not to laugh along with the other two to save him further blushes.

It is a valiant but futile effort. Lin, apparently still at the stage in life when romantic heroes trump successful businessmen, stops ogling Bruce and gets positively starry-eyed, waxing lyrical about the episode.

"It was incredible, Mr Wainwright," she gushes. "They only got about five seconds of TV footage but it was fantastic. This man was like a warrior from legend, flying up there. I was only thirteen at the time and I would have given _anything_ to meet him. Actually, I think I still would," she adds, dreamily.

By now Selina has chewed the inside of her cheeks into mincemeat. Next to her, Bruce does his damned best not to laugh, and amazingly, he succeeds. If he is also trying not to blush, he is failing miserably.

Oh well, time to rescue the _warrior from legend_.

"See, I've been telling you," she says, nudging him, before addressing Lin with her hastily concocted explanation. "I've just been telling him again how much I'd like the two of us to go hang-gliding. I keep trying to convince him that it's really fun, and he's too scared to believe me."

xxx

"Anyone you're looking for?"

They are sitting in a relatively quiet corner of the bustling Tokio Joe, grabbing a simple but exquisitely fresh sushi dinner, when Bruce catches her scanning the crowd. Logically, she should be on the lookout for anyone who might recognise either of them to save them an embarrassing conversation, or worse, the risk of exposure; irrationally, she _wants_ some acquaintance from her earlier stay to walk in and take an eyeful of the two of them flirting their way through the meal. Admittedly there would be a bit of explaining to do about her sudden disappearance, but she wants to draw some sort of symbolic line below the two months she spent here recovering but still not quite living.

_No_, she is about to say, and stops herself. It would certainly make him jealous... but just this once, she does not want to tease him with imaginary rivals when she has been reminded of his recent status as her imaginary dead husband. "Yes, actually," she replies instead. "The day I found your card, I was about to have dinner at the Gaddis with this guy from Brazil who said he might have a business offer for me." She notices his momentary scowl, though it looks to be provoked by the over-the-top restaurant choice rather than the would-be date as such. "I was interested enough to want to hear what he had to say. He didn't know anything about me and thought I was rich," she explains, omitting the _widow_ bit, "and I finally made myself open the box to put on the pearls to look the part. The rest, as they say," she half-smiles at him, "is history. I was just thinking it would be funny to see him now."

"You should have told me this before," he counters, mirroring her expression. "Seeing how I am forever indebted to him for your phone call, I'd have invited him for dinner to thank him."

"Some other time, perhaps. For now, I'd rather have you to myself, _Mr Legendary Warrior_, so that you'd tell me more about your airborne adventure," she prompts.

"Believe it or not, it started with the orgy." The positively flirtatious way he says it makes her want to laugh already.

"Which wasn't really an orgy, as I recall," she teases, quoting his earlier comment.

He grins at her. "Precisely. I should have thought better of it, in retrospect," he continues, obviously enjoying taunting her, "but I left myself way too little time to make the most of being on a boat with thirty or so very attractive girls before I had an important date to go on." He pauses – deliberately, the bastard – seeing that he has piqued her curiosity. "With Lucius," he finishes.

"Did you guys enjoy it?" she winks at him.

"A lot. It was very romantic," he deadpans. "He picked me up in a seaplane and we flew over here, and he went and talked to Lau officially... and gathered enough info about the building to allow me to then go and talk to Lau _un_officially later that night."

"If our friend Lin is to be believed, _go_ is a misnomer in your case," she suggests, raising an eyebrow and making flying gestures with her fingers.

He grins again. "_If_ you insist on precise terminology, then I didn't _talk_ much to him, either. I just grabbed him and got us both lifted on board the plane so that _Gordon_ could talk to him."

She smiles, but it all sounds almost too much fun for her liking, the way he is relishing the memory. Stupid as it is, it makes her feel ridiculously jealous not of a person, but of her boyfriend's former _persona_. So much for Bruce thinking once that it was Batman and not him that she was after. Then again, it makes two of them, both jealous of the same symbol from the past. Talk about confusing.

xxx


	7. Florence

Another short chapter, and then I'll take a break tonight and tomorrow to read up on safecracking ;) and finally catch up on work and sleep a bit!

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If this is _before_ the tourists arrive, she'd be scared to see _after_. Looking at the human throng filing onto the Ponte Vecchio from the balcony of her suite fifty feet above and the same distance to the west of the bridge, Selina is not even sure she wants to go out there.

She has other reasons for wanting to stay indoors, of course; ever since they arrived the previous afternoon, they discovered that their river view suite had an exceptionally comfortable bed, and it would be a shame not to make the most of it. She struggled to keep a straight face when, just as they went out for dinner that night, Bruce stopped by at the Lungarno Suites concierge desk to say, in a casually confidential manner, that they had just come back from East Asia that morning (true), were extremely tired (not true), and should not therefore be disturbed in their suite under any pretext, including housekeeping, fire, and earthquake, for the duration of their stay, unless they expressly asked for it. The concierge nodded his understanding, shot a glance at Selina looking anything but extremely tired, and to his credit, managed to keep a straight face as well.

Their best chance of seeing the city, they soon discover, lies in being quasi-nocturnal. On the second day they sleep obscenely late, grab dinner at the restaurant across the river they are supposed to catch Alfred at – she laughed when Bruce explained to her that the matter of knowing the right restaurant was perfectly straightforward as the only half decent place answering Alfred's description of being _on the banks of the Arno_ was named, in a testament to the man's sense of irony, none other than _Alfredo sull'Arno_ – and walk around the city afterwards, when the tourists have mostly dispersed. Later that night they set an alarm to wake up at 5 am to have the city entirely to themselves for two hours at sunrise. She wouldn't make a habit of it, but it is a magical experience.

They follow a similar pattern for the subsequent three days, except that instead of exploring Florence, they spend early mornings or late afternoons in nearby towns before coming back to the _Alfredo_ for dinner. Florence may be the best known Tuscan attraction, but she soon finds that the region, and Italy by extension, has plenty more to offer, so much so that her list of places to see is now being rivalled by a growing list of places to come back to. And apart from the somewhat regular exclamations of _che bella macchina_ and _che bella donna_ accompanying them on their excursions, they have the comfort of being if not exactly unnoticed, then at least safely incognito in this living-history playground. They stroll through the quaint forest of medieval towers in San Gimignano, brave the steep hills of Siena, marvel at lovely Lucca set like a jewel in its ancient city walls, and even beat their early-morning stunt, this time waking up at 4 am to make it to Pisa and enjoy the usually non-existent peace and quiet in Campo dei Miracoli without a single tourist or a single hawker in sight. Much as she wants to see Alfred, she is glad that the man did not show up on the first five evenings.

xxx

"Not again," she teases him on the afternoon of the sixth day as they are preparing to go out.

"What?" Bruce is looking at her in confusion, the jacket hanging off one arm.

"Do you own any casual clothes that are _not_ black?" She makes big round eyes at him. In the five days they've been there, she has seen him in at least three different outfits… of the same colour.

"Almost all my shirts are white – " he begins.

"I said _casual_. Which means that the business suits don't count, either." Not that those are exactly a riot of colour, running the range from dark navy blue to charcoal grey.

With the expression of a Christian martyr, he puts down the jacket, pulls off the black T-shirt, and finally – a real miracle – pulls out a white one from somewhere in the carry-on suitcase. "Point proven."

"Point taken," she agrees, reluctantly. "But if you're still putting that black jacket on top of it and zipping it up…"

He puts up his hands in mock surrender. "OK, you win. But I'm not responsible for not being allowed into the restaurant wearing a T-shirt..." he casts a hopeful eye on the jacket once more.

His tactic is ridiculous; the place is nowhere near formal enough to demand jackets. But it gives her an idea.

"As I recall, when you bought me _this_," she pinches the matte silk of her cornflower-blue dress, "we agreed that I'd buy you something in return. And you'd given me explicit permission to be _depraved_ about it."

He looks genuinely worried for a split second; this is beyond priceless. "OK, if you have to… I'm at your mercy."

Twenty minutes later it seems like he is regretting his surrender when he sees what exactly she had in mind: the Italian male's romantic, confident-in-his-masculinity choice of a casual jacket in a colour best described as _dusty pink_. He looks from her to the garment and back again a couple of times, but says nothing; much as she is enjoying the status quo in its own right, she wants her victory.

"Running from a challenge, are we?"

He shakes his head; invoking challenges is a killer blow. "Fine." He hands her the jacket. You go and pay for it, _rich girl_, so we can get out of here."

She only sees Alfred as a fleeting glimpse. They chat and laugh their way through dinner that evening and she does not know when he arrives, though she knows the instant Bruce has noticed him sitting somewhere behind her back. She turns halfway, as if looking at something or trying to spot a waiter, and sees him there, watching them with an oddly intent expression before finishing his drink, getting up and walking away. She'd like to think that they'll see each other again, but for now, just seeing the heartbreak of loss gone from his face is enough to tell her that he, too, will be all right.

xxx

She feels it before she has opened her eyes, like static crackling on her skin. They are back in Lugano, having returned mid-afternoon the previous day once they'd seen Alfred, and she was planning to sleep late and drive the Harley to the office after lunch, letting Bruce take the Sesto in the morning. But even though she knows it is still early, the tone of Bruce's voice talking to someone on the phone at the far end of the terrace goes through her like a jolt. She knows that voice.

"Do we know how he died?"

She is petrified. Please, please for God's sake, don't let it be Alfred. Or Lucius, or Theo, or Gordon, or even Blake. Please, don't let it be any of those. She throws on the silk shirt and steps out; not knowing what happened is even worse.

He sees her and reads the question in her eyes – and shakes his head a fraction of an inch, seeking to dispel her fear. No one who matters to him, or to her. But the set lines of his face, so sharp that she can practically see the outline of the mask, tell a different story.

She walks, or rather staggers, back inside and sits on the bed until he has finished the call, grabbed by a crazy fear that he will just conjure up the damned suit from somewhere, jump in the car and be gone. It's a relief when he steps into the room, though a slight relief at that.

"That was Theo on the phone," he explains, saving her the need for a question. "He says he and I have just been invited to the funeral of Giacomo Varese."

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Before you think it was a convenient invention of mine, I must tell you that the _Alfredo Sull'Arno_ is not only real, but _is_, in fact, the only half decent place overlooking the river a short distance from the Ponte Vecchio on the side opposite the city centre. You can look it up on alfredosullarno dot com; I've been to Florence a few times (the company I work at has its HQ there, among other reasons), but only discovered this gem of a fact by "walking" along the Arno with Google View to pick a good restaurant for this chapter. I am now convinced that it was Nolan's reason for sending them to a Florentine café in the first place ;)

Generally speaking, the comments on Italian locations in this and the following chapters reflect reality; but I won't tempt fate and ffnet's spam filter with photo links for commonly known places such as Florence and Portofino. If you are curious (I hope you are ;) ), a Google image search will show you what they are like.


	8. Fallout

I can't say enough times how much I appreciate the reviews and feedback. Writing this is fun, but living through it as an interactive process, even more so.

By way of a status update, the plot summary for the remainder of this, by now 101% complete (not that it stops me from micro-tweaking), now stands at 12K words with 10 more chapters remaining. I give up on guessing its total length other than saying that it will be somewhere in the 45-55K range, but I am sticking to the 18-chapter structure, even though I am pretty sure that #13 will be a 7000-word monster; and I've now added chapter headings to reflect the overall plot. I'll try to post a chapter daily (except for #13, again), or once every couple of days – I almost wish I could slow myself down ;)

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She knows that logic is powerless here; she could argue that it is premature to blame himself unless they are absolutely certain of the cause of death; that even if Varese has not died from natural causes, it does not necessarily point to Chinese assassins; that even if there _is_ a Chinese connection, the fact that the mention of his name has been a death warrant likely means that the man was doomed already; that it seems far-fetched to say the least – but she knows that dissuading him will not make him feel any less responsible for a few words he has uttered on a deserted airstrip four thousand miles away.

She tries it still.

"Did Theo say how he died?"

"No." His voice is hollow, years older than yesterday. "The way he talked about it, doesn't seem that anyone suspects." Talking as if all those worst-case scenario facts had been established already.

"If he was killed because you simply mentioned his name, then he had no chances anyway, then it could have been anyone or anything triggering it – "

"But it was _me_."

"You don't know that. Don't you believe in the presumption of innocence?"

"When there is any innocence to be presumed, yes."

She wants to slam into him and tackle him to the floor, and not in a sexy way. "You really enjoy taking the blame, don't you ? Just like your hero persona – "

"I can't..." the pain in his voice makes her flinch in sympathy. "I can't just switch it off like that. I am no longer Batman but I can't suddenly be OK with people dying because of me."

And we're back to square one, she thinks; but then she should have known what she was getting into and who she was getting into bed with. This is, after all, the man who stared death in the face to save a city that had demonised him, once its hero, but this ridiculous crazy attitude is one of the reasons she came back for him in a doomed city instead of leaving, after all. This is the ultimate fool who rushes in where angels fear to tread; he is certainly no angel but he sure is one big suicidal altruistic fool of a demon.

"You're going to the funeral, aren't you?"

"Yes."

"I'm going with you. No argument."

"There's a reason why you can't." He sounds so fucking _satisfied_ saying it. "Remember, I told them that you were his son's fiancée and we were having an affair. We can't be seen together."

"I'm still going. I just won't go to the funeral itself."

"Is there anything that can stop you?" He sounds defeated; she did not expect him to give in so easily.

"You know the answer."

He just sighs. "Come on, let's get dressed. We need to go and warn Theo about all this."

xxx

"_Non mi dire delle cazzate, Wainwright._" Theo sounds positively severe, like a headmaster berating a misbehaving pupil, and has upgraded from his habitual _non mi dire delle stronzate_, as in _don't bullshit me_, to basically accusing Bruce of verbal idiocy. "You can't possibly blame yourself for this."

Across the table from him in his Wainwright Security office, Selina mouths a silent _thank you_.

"Sorry for the French, Céline," he gives her a quick look. The colloquial Italian designation of profanity unexpectedly makes her smile.

"No worries." She is proud of being able to reply to him in Italian, even if it is a simple thing. She is still miles away from being fully fluent, but her efforts are paying off. "Living with _him_," she nods at Bruce, "I really need to practice Italian swearwords."

"Does he always blame himself for everything?" She suspects that Theo knows the answer.

"You have _no idea_," she says in English, to best display the emphasis.

"The fact remains that Giacomo Varese has paid for our lucky escape with his life," Bruce cuts in, grimly. "You may disagree but I am positive about it. But whether or not I blame myself is irrelevant at the moment. The _other_ fact is that we don't know if they're going to come looking for us," he points to himself and to her, "which means that they could also pose a danger to _you_." As an added source of self-torment, he told Selina on the way to the office that his villa had been registered in Theo's name for years since he bought it, at least until they found time to take care of transfer formalities a month ago, which meant that anyone who might want to track him to Lugano would probably pick up Theo on their radar screen, not to mention their business association posing the same risk.

"I can take care of myself," Theo cuts him off, and continues, ignoring his impatient look, "_and_ my family. I'll send them to my in-laws' house in Lucerne tomorrow, I have a couple of former colleagues living there and the house itself is a hundred yards away from a police station. You worry about yourself," he finishes his stern declaration, "and about Céline."

Now is Bruce's turn to say the silent _thank you. _"I told her not to come, good luck dissuading her."

"At the very least," Theo is ostensibly talking to Bruce, but looking at her, "she shouldn't be seen anywhere near the ceremony."

Bruce reacts to this with a not-so-silent _that's what I said_.

"I agreed to that already," she jumps in.

"Good girl," Theo mutters and continues, now looking at Bruce: "Are you positive you don't want me to go along? If we need to start digging up dirt, as I suspect you want to, it could help if we – "

Apparently, they are destined to keep interrupting each other in this discussion, though little wonder considering its subject matter and their mutual concern.

"I _forbid _you to," Bruce states flatly. "I own the fucking company and I _insist_ that you are needed here to take care of business. I am not going to be responsible for your children growing up orphans."

Theo looks like he might try arguing, but decides to drop it and change tack. "Do you need any extra surveillance installed in Carona?"

Selina puts on a sarcastic face. "What do you mean, _extra_? I don't think he has _any_."

"The fact that you didn't _see_ it doesn't mean there _isn't_ any," Bruce counters smugly. "And the fact that you've seen it doesn't mean that there isn't more to it than meets the eye."

Oops.

"Don't tell me you saw me." It really shouldn't matter, but she can't help blushing at the thought that he actually watched her break into the villa a month ago.

"Not at the time," he concedes. "I admit I'd switched off the sensors, I need to recalibrate them because I was getting really tired after I kept getting the alarm triggered by, well, bats flying by." She has no intention of exposing him, but finds his imploring look directed at her after these words positively endearing. "But as soon as I looked at camera footage the following evening after we came back from the movies, I saw you right there," he concludes, quietly triumphant.

She is momentarily stumped. "But that's a regular – "

"_That_," he continues, all but grinning, "is an Axis Lightfinder camera in regular camera _housing_." She notices Theo nodding his understanding and, embarrassingly, smirking at her. "We make them under licence from the Swedes, but I decided not to advertise the fact that I have a camera with night vision capability to anyone who might want to come looking."

Theo takes pity on her and directs his next question at Bruce, who is still enjoying his minor victory. "What about files, papers," he looks at Selina, "jewels and so on? I know you have a safe there, but I'd still suggest you – "

"I'll bring all that to the vault here," Bruce finishes for him.

"And I don't have any jewellery besides these," Selina adds, touching the string at her neck. "And I'm going to wear them anyway." She probably should explain to Theo about the tracker, but figures that it can wait.

"I keep most of my stuff at the company vault as it is," Bruce continues. "I've made a habit of it years ago, after a madman burned down my house," he explains. "Miranda's father, actually," he adds for Selina's benefit.

"Figures," she scowls. Theo just looks from one to another, curiosity written on his face.

"Long story," Bruce mutters. "And the worst of it was, to add insult to injury everyone said I'd started the fire myself in a drunken stupor. Now you've told me you've been checking on that pulp mill already," he goes on, changing the subject. "Any leads?"

Theo shakes his head, looking less than pleased. "Chen and I have been able to pull up their company registration data and tax records but it all looks hopelessly clean. Even though I agree with you that a pulp mill in that area has to be an excuse for _something_. To make it worse, it is listed as a foreign investment and its immediate owners are a collection of Indonesian fronts, and it'll take time to work our way through that."

"Could you pull strings at the Interpol?" Bruce interjects hopefully.

"I've been trying to, already," Theo answers, "I've called the guy at the China NCB and he was willing to talk, considering those GPS-tracker police radios we supplied to them. But there isn't much to go on. He ran a firearms database search for me, no recent crimes involving AK47s in Qinghai or neighbouring regions. In principle he could get a blue notice issued, the info request, but to do that we need a suspect name, at the very least. I'll keep looking into the Indonesia connection, if we pull up something there the China NCB could help us with a query, maybe through the financial crime unit, to see if there is any evidence of Triad money laundering through those fronts. But it all takes time," Theo rubs his forehead in annoyance, "and I have to rely on favours. If I had a normal person at the Swiss NCB to deal with, it could all be done a lot faster, but the current head is the worst kind of _coglione_ stickler for bureaucracy. Sorry Céline."

"Which kind is that?" she asks, waving away his apology.

"A coward," Theo replies. "Won't stray an inch from procedure for fear of his ass being kicked, because he knows he's too incompetent to be in his post in the first place."

They spend a few more minutes talking, mapping out their next steps, until Theo gets called away on an urgent business matter and bids her and Bruce a reluctant goodbye.

"I still say you're taking it too personally, Brandon, but I know you won't listen. I'd have probably felt the same way in your place. And I hope I don't need to tell you to watch out," is his final admonition. "We still don't know for sure who it was, or why they did it. It could be your Chinese friends, or it could just be the local Chinese mafia there, or even the Italian Mafia, or it could be family, some pissed-off relative settling scores. Or he could have died of a heart attack. You never know. Just keep playing clueless."

He shakes hands with them both before abandoning the business etiquette in favour of hugs, and sends them off.

xxx

Several hours later they are driving past the gently rolling Tuscan countryside, past the dark green candlesticks of the cypresses and the dots of scarlet poppies sprinkled amid grass whose fresh early-summer green has not yet been bleached to dull yellow by the July heat. Weren't they just here? Yesterday, a hundred years ago.

Instead of heading all the way back into Florence, they take the exit to Prato, the Tuscan textile capital, twelve or thirteen miles to the northeast. As she eventually sees, it has a lovely, compact medieval centre; but it takes a few minutes driving through dreary industrial suburbs to get there. It is not heavily industrial by northern European or even northern Italian standards, but is distinctly lacking in appeal, with rows of graffiti-covered corrugated iron fences screening off the long half-barrels of warehouses and the ugly, low square boxes of factories, with occasional glimpses of laundry on washing lines strung between windows. The factory workers in this area are mostly Chinese, Bruce tells her, and they are made to live in near-inhuman conditions by Triad enforcers; those who have to live inside the factory may be lucky by comparison to those who have to share a hundred-square-foot room with four others. To prove his point about the makeup of the population, the majority of shop sigs and even some street names, except in the very centre, are written in _hanzi_.

They find a welcome respite from this jarring scene in the stylishly monochromatic Wall Art Hotel just off the city centre near the train station, its Oriental undertones more evocative of Japanese minimalism than ornate Chinese opulence. Bruce immediately powers up his laptop to continue looking for possible connections, however implausible, between Tessuti Varese, the late Giacomo's company, and the Chinese mill, and she takes the Sesto into Florence to get herself a business suit, in case Bruce changes his mind about her attending the funeral or, more likely, in case any subsequent investigation they may end up doing should require business attire. Her Hong Kong wardrobe, while predominantly safely black, veers more to the smart casual than the formal end of the range. She is happy to find what she was looking for, an elegant dark grey pantsuit, before the shops close for the day and before she goes back to Prato for a quiet dinner in a simple local restaurant in the old centre.

The next day, when Bruce is away to attend the funeral, she switches on the TV and does her best to follow the Italian programs; with the exception of the occasional insightful documentary, these are known for their inane boredom and questionable taste, but her priority is getting a better hang of the language. Bruce may argue all he wants, but she has a sense that it may come in handy in the coming days.

He comes back mid-afternoon, looking understandably downbeat, additional reasons becoming apparent as he tells her about the ceremony. The family were all mostly there, but they were either too scared or too completely in the dark to say much. The apparent cause of Varese's death was said to have been a severe food allergy; while highly suspicious, it is nowhere near as conclusive as a bullet in the head, and apparently an autopsy was done in the Florentine hospital the ambulance had taken him to, San Giovanni di Dio, and no other irregularities found.

On the unexpectedly promising side, however, he tells her that he has an appointment for later that evening.

"Gianfranco wants to talk to me about installing additional security at the villa," he calls out to her, lounging on the bed, as he sits down to continue his online quest. "It's already festooned with sensors to the back teeth, but I don't blame him for wanting more."

"Who's Gianfranco?" she asks. Obviously a relative, but the name has not come up before.

"His son," Bruce replies. "He had three children, two elder daughters, both married and living in Milan, and this one. He's your fiancé, by the way," he finishes, a hint of irony in his voice.

She remembers the story he hastily conjured up in China, though he had never mentioned the name. "Did you tell him that?"

"No, I figured I'd go with Theo's advice and not put too much trust in anyone here. Besides," he shoots a quick glance at her, "I didn't want to give pretty boy any ideas."

"He's pretty, huh?" It is a good opportunity to tease him, but she can't quite muster the enthusiasm.

"You'll see for yourself," he replies. "I told him you'd be coming along as a colleague of mine. I figured I could do with a second pair of eyes, and there are worse places to go to than a house my company equipped with alarms."

She isn't going to be so unsubtle as to thank him for bringing her along, but sure as hell she isn't going to argue, either.

xxx

_Pretty_, she reflects, is in fact a perfect description of Gianfranco Varese. He looks to be in his early thirties, a couple of years older than her, and looking at his refined, almost delicate features and stylish appearance, she can't quite apply the _handsome_ epithet to him – he is _too_ refined for that – but _pretty_ he definitely is. Of average height but good build, with a full head of dark brown hair that is more curly than wavy – a considerable asset as many Italians tend to baldness regardless of age – and limpid blue eyes, dressed in an expensively tailored suit, wearing a Rolex and shoes that look custom-made, he looks quite the playboy; not, perhaps, of the over-the-top and fiercely reckless Wayne brand, but of a subtler, mellower, softer persuasion, and way too fidgety for her taste.

They are talking in his late father's dimly-lit, wood-panelled, leather-upholstered, cluttered-looking study on the ground floor of the extensive villa, just over a mile northeast from Prato's centre in the hills rising toward the hamlet of Filettole; the ostensible reason is, as Bruce told her earlier, Gianfranco's desire to bolster the already considerable security, and it is apparently important enough for him to spare half an hour away from his father's wake in the sombre dining room next door. They look like some sort of uniformed secret society attired in designer charcoal grey tropical wool, between Gianfranco's Brioni and Bruce's Zegna and her Armani; no self-respecting Italian north of Rome would wear the disgrace of a black suit that is not actually a black tie dinner jacket, even to a funeral. She listens to them discussing camera specs and sensor trigger values and cost estimates and pretends to take notes; as a thief, she would be supremely interested in these but her interest now is more of a psychological than technical nature. And the thing that strikes her most is that Gianfranco does not look terribly bereaved.

Sure enough, he mentions the loss, but Gianfranco's main concern seems to be the family's dilemma of what to do with their stake in Tessuti Varese now that Varese senior is gone, considering, Selina reflects, that he seems to have been the only one emotionally invested in the company. His two married daughters, Gianfranco's sisters, have no interest in it and no desire to move from their comfortable Milanese homes for the drab reality of Prato, and Gianfranco himself apparently is not keen on running the company either. He talks about having always wanted to go to California to open a restaurant, about the opportunities it could open up for his aspiring-model girlfriend, currently away on a photo shoot in Bali and unable to come back for the funeral. Bruce seems to have picked up on it as well and casually casts oblique questions about the situation with the company, trying to gauge the extent of Gianfranco's indifference and see if he can perhaps pick up any hint of resentment.

It doesn't seem to be the case, except that Gianfranco seems highly sceptical of his late father's dogged resistance to handing the company over to professional management in favour of continuing as a hands-on manager himself and trying to keep Tessuti Varese a family business, a view that Bruce seems likewise unimpressed by. Apparently Giacomo had seen the Chinese partners as a way of keeping the status quo, as they were similarly uninterested in newfangled management tricks and public listings. If Gianfranco gives off any vibe talking about all this, it is not one of resentment but rather one of reserve, of being guarded and carefully weighing his words. After a few minutes it is apparent to both Bruce and Selina that they are not going to get any more useful information out of this encounter, and having exchanged a furtive look and promised to Gianfranco that they would get back to him with an estimate for the extra surveillance equipment, they take their leave and let Gianfranco rejoin the wake.

"I have to give it to Theo," Selina muses in the car on their way back to the hotel. "Don't know if he's met Gianfranco, but there may be truth in his hunch about family."

Bruce does not answer immediately. "I don't think he killed his father, if that's what you imply." He chews his lower lip for a second. "Or that he paid anyone else to do it. But he definitely knows more than he's letting on, and the trouble is, without him we're going to be poking around in the dark on this end once we've confirmed the most basic facts."

"Which basic facts do you mean?"

"The fact that Giacomo was poisoned. Men in their sixties don't suddenly develop food allergies, and in all the time we've been talking to Gianfranco, he never mentioned it once when talking about his father's death."

xxx

Hospitals are scarily easy to get into, she reflects; it is true that most people who end up in them are more concerned with their health than their security, but she does not envy those who may have problems with both. Basically, they just go in, tell the receptionist a ridiculously implausible story about Selina needing to retrieve a medical certificate she forgot to ask for earlier after an imaginary walk-in visit that she must present to her employer as an excuse for a missed day of work, give the names of a doctor and night nurse they've looked up online, and are allowed to go upstairs, where the nurse is supposed to be keeping the certificate for them – no ID checks, no calls to the nurse or the doctor, no way of telling that instead of going two floors up, they are indeed headed two floors down, into the mortuary. No cameras, either, thus giving Selina a free hand with picking the mortuary office lock.

Notwithstanding the advent of the electronic age, the principal autopsy report on Giacomo Varese is to be found on paper in the office and contains a detailed description of the symptoms and consequences of anaphylactic shock brought about by a severe peanut allergy. So detailed and seemingly exhaustive as to make the two of them wonder if it had been lifted out of a textbook, and make them spend an extra half hour, after photocopying the report, on cracking the computer password to see if they can find Varese's previous medical history through the link to the database of local health provider data that the hospital is able to access in case of emergencies such as the dying Varese's arrival.

Their effort is rewarded when they see the date of the most recent update on Varese's history as the day after his death, and reading through it, they see the same textbook-perfect allergy diagnosis. And looking at the signature, they see the same doctor's name as the one on the autopsy report.

"Do me a favour," Bruce mutters to her as he folds the autopsy report photocopy to put into his jacket pocket and she gets ready to power down the computer. "See if you can look up the contact details of this Michele Secchi guy. I think we'd better talk to him."

xxx

Michele Secchi is scared out of his wits, and trying in vain not to show it. He is sitting on the sofa in his well-appointed apartment, his equally scared girlfriend is whimpering in a corner, and Bruce and Selina are sitting on either side of him in case he tries to bolt again, as he did when they showed up, after they'd come in and admitted to him that their fake emergency story and his colleague's referral were just that, fake. Tying him up might be a more efficient option, but the danger then is that he'd either start screaming and need to be gagged, or lose his voice altogether.

After about five minutes of accusations, begging and dithering, Bruce asks the girlfriend if there is any grappa in the house – a plausible assumption in case of a doctor moonlighting at autopsies and, apparently, at falsifying records, as an emergency tranquiliser to counteract frayed nerves – and ten more minutes later, having drunk what seems half a bottle of the rocket-fuel stuff – Selina and Bruce both barely managed two sips – Secchi is finally ready to talk.

"Please, I beg you, don't mention my name anywhere, or they'll kill me."

"Who?" Selina asks; Bruce has wisely let her take the lead, considering that his voice seems to send Secchi into paroxysms of panic.

"The people who came here two days ago, after I'd done the autopsy on Varese's body. They – they threatened us with guns and locked Giovanna in the bedroom and made me go with them back to the hospital and burn the autopsy report I'd just written and rewrite it, and alter his medical records. Please, I can't let anyone find out. If the hospital finds out that I did this I'm fired, and if the Chinese find out that I told you I'm dead," he concludes, shaking.

"They were Chinese?" Selina prompts.

Secchi realises his slip, but is already so scared that it makes little difference.

"Yes," he moans. "You know Prato's full of them, and half of them are Chinese mafia. It's chased the Italian mobsters away from here. I never thought I'd end up in their way, it's this damned Varese man, why did he die in time for my shift?"

"What was in your original report?"

Secchi looks like he is about to start crying.

"We won't tell anyone, I swear. Not your name, not about the false report. We're going after them from a different direction," Bruce assures him in his softest and quietest voice, which, Selina thinks, is surprisingly soothing. "We just need to know, for ourselves."

Secchi looks up to him, and makes the leap of faith.

"Poison," he breathes.

xxx

.

The AXIS night vision outdoor camera is technically called AXIS Q-1602-E, but I figured it would be too boring a name. It does, however, use patented Lightfinder technology.

NCB stands for an Interpol National Central Bureau, its main coordination and liaison unit in any given country. Blue notices are Interpol information requests; the Interpol uses a colour-coded system for its various notices, warrants, and alerts.

What I write about the Chinese in Prato may sound rather xenophobic (I shouldn't be talking, I was not born here either), but it is true that Prato is the centre of the Tuscan textiles industry, that it is being taken over by Chinese businesses (and their rank-and-file workers, often illegal immigrants, live in appalling conditions), and that the Chinese mafia aka Triad has been replacing the Italian mafia around Florence and in Prato. As a side note, we were just having lunch yesterday with a colleague who was visiting the Rome office from Florence HQ and lives near Prato, and he was telling us that most of the street signs and shop signs around Prato are now in Chinese and that many of them live right in the factories (both of which, as you've seen, I've stuck into my narrative), and that Triad presence there is a real thing.


	9. Glorified accountants

This chapter is basically a bit of exposition I need to get out of the way before going ahead with the plot. Apologies in advance if the ownership chain and financial stuff in this chapter is beyond boring; this has been my area of work expertise for quite a while and being a plausibility freak, I had to think through the logic of how Bruce and Theo could put two and two together, but it won't feature in the later plot at this level of detail. In case you are curious to work your way through it once you get to the relevant point, I ended up drawing a chart to map out the situation for myself; it should help clarify the "Chinese boxes" of Tessuti Varese ownership and business connections: (http) i46*tinypic*com/23mkh86*jpg, asterisks=dots (in reality, something like this would be more complicated, but I don't want readers chasing me with a poleaxe, or worse, falling asleep). Grey boxes are fronts and holdings, blue boxes are manufacturing companies, blue arrows are shareholding stakes, and red arrows are supplies. The relevant thing to remember for future chapters is that there is an indirect but nonetheless active connection between Tessuti Varese and Gonghe Rongbaolin, the pulp mill.

.

Selina suspects that the Cassa di Risparmio di San Miniato, where Tessuti Varese s.r.l. has its company accounts, would take a rather dim view of Bruce impersonating its Prato branch director... but thankfully they'll never know, as he is doing it sitting in the Wainwright Security offices, tapping on his laptop keyboard. He has decided to look for company accounts rather than the Varese family members' private accounts, as he thinks it likely that the latter are mostly offshore and, like his own, probably numbered, while the name of the bank keeping company accounts is publicly disclosed. After they came back to Lugano late last night, Bruce and Theo have divided tasks, with Bruce starting his quest from Tessuti Varese and Theo continuing to look at the Chinese pulp mill, its customers and the Indonesian fronts that own it and potential Triad leads; with any luck, they say, they'll cross paths somewhere. Selina feels the odd one out considering that both of them are better at these things than she is, but does not feel like staying at the villa away from the action, so she opens the Italian course files on her tablet, puts on the headphones, and tries to concentrate, until she gives up and sits next to Bruce to watch him at work.

Cassa di Risparmio aside, what Bruce is doing is not so much hacking as bypassing lengthy and tedious bureaucratic application procedures to access information that is, in fact, disclosed to the interested public upon request, using previously-created usernames and passwords to log into Chamber of Commerce company registers and tax agency websites in Italy and partially China (Theo is handling Indonesia on his own) as recognised and authorised users, to view tax filings and financials and company ownership data.

A few hours of this snooping have told him that Tessuti Varese is currently owned 24% by the Varese family, 25% by someone called Wu Ming, and the remaining 51% by Chinese fronts that, at first glance, look fairly impenetrable. He has also found out that Tessuti Varese, or rather the late Giacomo, bought 25% in Qingdao Jinglian, a trading company in China, a year ago. He was surprised to see it labelled as a trading company whereas Varese had told him that he owned a stake in a yarn factory, until he then discovered that Qingdao in turn owns 100% in Zhenjiang Zili that, he saw, does indeed produce and spin polyester yarn. It would seem logical that Zili would be a direct supplier of spun yarn to Tessuti Varese given their indirect co-ownership, but instead Zili production is then bought by an intermediary called Xianrong that trades in all sorts of textile goods, and if Tessuti Varese is among its buyers it is not immediately clear. However, the subsequent look at Tessuti Varese bank accounts at the Cassa di Risparmio points him to increased amounts recently paid to a Chinese supplier that is, indeed, listed as one of the Xianrong clients. It would seem stupid to pay two intermediaries' margins to procure yarn from a company Tessuti Varese has a stake in, but that would assume that their dealings are straight business – which they most likely aren't. Finally, a look at Tessuti Varese tax filings and financial records on the Agenzia delle Entrate web site database shows losses for the past two years due to falling production despite increased payments to suppliers. Obviously, the company's real business must have been moved off the books.

"As the least-evil scenario, it's tax evasion," Bruce tells them both over the quick takeaway dinner they have ordered into the office before calling it a day, "but unless we prove it, we can't ask to arrest them just for making losses... by that logic, I'd have spent a couple of years in jail for the losses my family's company had run until recently. And even if we do prove tax evasion it'll make us look like little more than glorified accountants."

"I have trouble seeing you as an accountant, Brandon, glorified or otherwise," Theo argues, "though you're pretty good at this stuff."

"I've never been one, luckily, but I was on the board of my parents' company for a while, and there was plenty of accounting being discussed," Bruce explains, the usual not-the-full-truth.

"Your parents could have done much worse than put you there," Theo remarks. Selina steals a quick glance at Bruce and is struck by how he looks sad and proud at once. Of course he can't mention to Theo that his parents never lived to see him take his place on the Wayne Enterprises board, let alone put him there.

"How much info did you find on the Chinese co-owners?" Theo asks next. "Is there anything we can hang an Interpol blue notice on, or do a nominal database check?"

"Not really," Bruce scowls. "The direct co-owner's name is Wu Ming, and doing a query on that sort of name is next to hopeless. At a conservative estimate, there are about thirty million Wu in China, and Ming is a very common given name. Can you imagine how many of them may have been arrested for petty crime? We might be better off trying to check with the Italian authorities for immigration records."

"That's assuming he isn't illegal," Theo corrects him. "And even if he arrived legally, which I doubt, we run into issues here because of the mess of a relationship between the Polizia dello Stato that reports to the Interior Ministry and the Carabinieri who report to the Defence Ministry. And with the guy I knew at the Rome NCB just retired, I have no major favours to call in. And besides," Theo concludes, "they hardly ever nab the big guys, it's mostly expendable forty-niners stupid enough to get caught."

"What does American football have to do with it?" Selina asks, and is somewhat embarrassed to see both men grin.

"Nothing," Bruce answers. "It's a code used in the Chinese Triad structure. There isn't actually one single centralised Triad organisation, rather a large number of separate and competing Triads, which also makes them harder to fight. But each of them has exactly the same structure. There's the boss known as Mountain Master or Dragon Head, who always has a numeric codename of 489; then there are three of his deputies with different names but the same code, 438, then there's the so-called "Red Pole" or chief enforcer who is a 426, then the "White Paper Fan" administrator who is, I think, 415; and the rank-and-file are called forty-niners. It's an I Ching numbers thing."

Oh well, maybe it isn't so embarrassing after all. There was o way she could have known _that_.

xxx

Eventually, by the afternoon of the following day, they have found enough to be able to put the pieces together. There is no direct, obvious business connection between the pulp mill, Gonghe Rongbaolin, and Tessuti Varese, but they do get two telling intersection points. One, Theo has tagged Qingdao Jinglian, Varese's minority-stake investment in China, as a Gonghe Rongbaolin client, and two, they have discovered, after working their way through the otherwise largely unhelpful info on the Chinese and Indonesian fronts respectively, that the ultimate parent of the Chinese fronts that Bruce tagged as Tessuti Varese owners, an outfit called Huaya Holdings, is exactly the same as the ultimate parent of Gonghe Rongbaolin through the Indonesian fronts that Theo found. If Huaya Holdings belongs to Triad owners, there is no obvious proof of that; but Theo hopes that he may be able to change that with more digging.

"Thing is," Bruce reflects glumly, "by now we pretty much know _who_ we're dealing with, but we still have no idea what it is they are really _doing_. I mean, textiles are not exactly a lethal business, it's not as if they're making pharmaceuticals or building nuclear plants or involved in other dual-use technology."

"I still figure that there must be drugs hidden in those boxes Rongbaolin is making," Theo suggests. "I wonder if Zhenjiang Zili uses Rongbaolin's boxes to ship yarn to Tessuti here?"

"Why the hell would they package synthetic yarn in cardboard when plastic is enough?" Bruce wonders.

"Precisely," Theo responds, turning to him. "There would be no logic to it unless there was more to it than meets the eye. So if we do manage to prove that Zili packages their yarn in Rongbaolin boxes and supplies it to Tessuti, we'll have plenty more to go on."

"We need to find out if Zili, or rather that Xianrong trader they use, ships overseas," Bruce picks up where Theo leaves off. "If they do, it'll show up in their records as payments to COSCO, considering that they're the state shipping monopoly."

Sure enough, there _are_ regular, if not exorbitant, payments to COSCO on Xianrong accounts; and once they have established that, they run a check on which of the COSCO container ships call into Livorno, Italy's huge port less than 70 miles away from Florence and Prato. They come up with five, all sailing under the Greek flag; called respectively the COSCO Beijing, Ningbo, Guangzhou, Yantian, and Greece, calling at Livorno at roughly bi-weekly intervals – makes sense as the sailing time between Guangzhou, China's largest southern port, and Livorno is about a month and they take about a week to offload and load cargo; that way there is always a ship arriving every two weeks. It is looking more and more like the murky picture is coming together, but there is still plenty to be done to obtain definite proof beyond theoretical conclusions.

"Just think of the irony," Theo says, trying to lighten the mood. "What we have here is a string of holding-company Chinese boxes owning a questionable outfit that makes, quite literally, _Chinese boxes_. It isn't often that you come across criminals as consistent as that."

xxx

.

For the record, I have no idea how easy, if at all possible, it is to hack into Chamber of Commerce and tax agency data. The reports in question are, indeed, largely available to interested parties but take time and bureaucratic procedures to procure, but I imagine that the tax agency is quite well protected against hacking, as, obviously, are banks.

Wu and Ming are, indeed, a very common Chinese surname and given name, respectively (the Chinese custom is to put surname first and to refer to people by surname); I got the 30 million estimate from a percentage of Wu in the total population that I found somewhere.

I based Chinese company names on versions of actual company names in the respective industries, with the exception of COSCO and its Greek-flag ships where I got the exact company name and ship names – I hope they don't sue me ;)

...and I trust Wikipedia on the truth about the I Ching-based Triad code numbers.


	10. Up, close, and personal

For those of you who have not yet been scared away by ownership charts, here is another short bit. As a final housekeeping note, I've realised that I would never muster the perseverance to type up a 7,000+ word chapter in one go, especially during the working week; hence I've split the four longer ones into manageable parts of 2-3.5 K words each, and am now looking at a total of 22 chapters – this is _absolutely, positively, definitely final_. Of these, 13 through 15 may be heavy on techno-babble, but the rest should be a pretty straightforward narrative.

.

"I can hear you thinking." They are in bed back at the villa, or rather _she_ is in bed while he is sitting sideways _on_ the bed still wearing the dressing gown. She suspects that he is waiting for her to doze off before he goes into the study to spend the night in front of the computer, and it makes her angry. "You might as well talk out loud."

He reaches for her hand; a simple gesture, but nonetheless effective in dissipating her anger. She sits up and leans against his side, stroking his back through the smooth silk, feeling the scars. The ones inflicted on skin and flesh aren't the worst by any measure.

"I want to go back," he says when she has given up on expecting an answer. It makes her flinch; for a terrifying instant she imagines he means going back to Gotham, casting aside the life he has embarked on here as an interlude between Batman and more Batman. Logic tells her that being legally dead might be an effective obstacle, but it still feels like she is falling from a height when she asks, just above a breath, "Where?"

"To China," he replies; and her relief, while relative and questionable, is still palpable. "I want to get to both those plants and see what exactly it is that they're making."

For once, logic and emotion are sufficiently well aligned to let her speak with conviction resulting from both. "I think it makes more sense to start from here. We can go back to Prato and take a look around the factory, and in the meantime you can keep looking for info in China online."

"Not sure I agree. Now that Varese is dead, they'll be expecting someone to come snooping here, but they won't expect me to go back there." If he did not call her out on the _we_, he is still making it clear that he sees China as a solo mission. "Besides, it's not the shortest route, but it is the more direct one. Going to China will let me see things at the source, and it'll be easier to follow the chain downstream from there than reconstruct it upstream from Prato."

She suspects that calling it the suicidal nonsense she believes it to be will gain her little besides a protracted verbal battle. Well, as they say, _if you can't beat them, join them_. "Fine. On one condition."

"No." The vehemence of his tone is unexpected. He gets up and walks right out of the bedroom, onto the terrace. After a few seconds of quietly fuming, she flips on the light, reaches for her shirt, and walks out after him.

He is standing on the terrace in the dark, the long black dressing gown falling from his shoulders looking exactly like the cape, and with the light now coming from the bedroom falling on his jaw with the rest of his face in darkness, the resemblance to the costume is complete. She is so struck that she literally stumbles back from him. To her, seeing Bruce as Batman is seeing Bruce going to his death; at this rate she'd rather tolerate the Wayne persona than this. He sees her reaction but makes no gesture to comfort her; instead he leans on the railing and looks away, over the lake.

She is not one to give up easily, however. "I can be useful, and I can take care of myself."

Her reasonable tone seems to work... somewhat. "I know. I've been your mark, and I've seen you fight. But that's not the point."

"What's so wrong about me going with you?"

"Everything."

"Can you be a bit more specific?" She injects her voice with all the sarcasm she can muster; she is not some sort of useless, helpless, burdensome creature.

But when he starts answering, she is sorry for her callousness.

"I told you... about Rachel," he says, quietly and hesitantly. "I told you how much she meant to me. Even when it looked clear that she was choosing Harvey over me, I still wanted to do everything to keep her safe, to have her near. It probably sounds masochistic, but even if she had chosen another, I couldn't let go, even if it meant we'd only see each other as friends. Of course I still hoped she'd change her mind, but that again is beyond the point. The point is, I didn't tell you how and why she died. I let her and Harvey get into a fight that should have been mine and mine alone. They had their reasons for wanting to jump into it, but the madman who killed them was looking for _me_, and was using others to get to me. I should have stopped them, and instead I let them both become his victims."

She is about to make a riposte about free will and people's right to pick their own fights, but something else in what he just said jumps out at her. "Harvey as in, Harvey _Dent_?"

"Yes," he exhales.

"But Harvey Dent was no one's victim. I've heard the contents of Gordon's draft resignation speech. He didn't want it published, but it was... leaked anyway. Harvey Dent killed five people in a deranged spree and died falling off a ledge. How exactly is that your fault?"

"It's _entirely_ my fault," he insists. "Harvey painted a huge target on himself when the Joker demanded that the Batman reveal himself and _he_ gave himself up as the Batman. He didn't even give me a chance. If it hadn't happened, he and Rachel wouldn't have been taken hostage and strapped to time bombs. And I could have, I _should_ have saved him afterwards... after she died. I saw him in hospital very briefly but I should have found a way to stay with him through the worst of it, should have let him spend his anger on me instead of others. He was a good man, a brave, honest man, and even if he didn't deserve the glory they covered him in after he died, he doesn't deserve to be remembered as a villain." He is still looking away from her so she cannot see his face; but he sounds broken, years of guilt, only fractionally justified, coming to the surface. "I can't keep letting people get killed when they take up my fights."

"This one's _my_ fight too," she argues, putting a hand on his shoulder. "_I_ suggested the trip to China, I was there with you on the plane, and right there when you were talking to them. You wouldn't have gone there if it hadn't been for me." And you wouldn't have been so anxious to keep trouble to a minimum.

"No, _I_ was the one who suggested China, and you didn't tell me to mention Varese."

"If I'd known of him, I _would_ have. In fact I would have done so _myself_. _I_ was the one who suggested Mongolia, anyway, and neither of us is responsible for its visa regime."

"You couldn't have mentioned him, you don't speak Chinese."

"The principle still stands."

It is a stalemate; they have descended from sweeping statements into petty details, but she likes it better this way. The more she can corner him with technicalities, the more difficult it is for him to go back to self-flagellation on a global scale.

And he may be foolish in many ways, but he has enough experience in tactical situations to know that he has to concede defeat here. Not that it makes him happy.

"You aren't letting go of this," he says, turning away from the lake and looking sideways at her. It isn't a question; she tries to hide her triumph.

"You're not the only stubborn one."

"That's libel. I'm not stubborn. I'm prepared to offer you a compromise."

"Go on."

"I agree to keep looking at this mess from the Italian end and not go to China until it becomes absolutely necessary. _If_ you agree to stay out of it."

She has multiple issues with this proposal, starting with the _until_ and the _absolutely necessary_ part and including the _stay out of it_ part; but it's a start, and it is best to cement her advantage now and try to build on it later.

"All right," she snaps, perhaps a touch exaggerated, and turns to leave... but when he gets hold of her arm and pulls her to him, she does not resist.

"I'm sorry," he whispers against her temple. "I didn't want to drag you into this mess."

"So long as my being dragged _into_ the mess means increased chances of you making it _out of_ it alive, I really don't mind," she counters with a touch of wry amusement.

"We were supposed to go to Venice this weekend, and instead we'll be dealing with _this_."

"We can always go later," she argues. "Venice isn't going anywhere."

"You never know." She can feel him smirking, his lips soft against her skin. "They say it's sinking."

"I don't know about you, but _I_'m betting on us making it there sometime in the next hundred years. It won't have sunk in that time."

.


	11. Lifting the lid

xxx

"So… which one came first, the villa or the boat?" she asks once she has taken in the sight of the Falcon at the pier of the tiny Portofino harbour. It is a valid question; Bruce's yacht is basically the Carona villa rendered seaworthy… or conversely, the villa is the Falcon landlocked. Sleek, gleaming white, spacious decks and metal railings and wraparound windows that can't really be called illuminators even at a stretch. Bruce is amused by her benign teasing; he was probably expecting more pointed barbs about his taste for the high life that he never before had time to enjoy, but she likes the thing too much to be disapproving.

"The villa," he admits, "but I probably had this boat in mind when explaining the design I wanted." Fair enough.

Earlier in the day they flew in his Cessna from Lugano, landing in the early afternoon at Pisa Galileo airport, a dozen miles north-northeast of Livorno and about sixty miles west of Florence. The hour-and-a-half flight allowed them to cut an hour off travel time, but Bruce's main reason for taking the plane was that by then, he had already driven into and out of Italy twice in the space of a few days, and spent five days driving it around Tuscany; with the Sesto technically not road-legal in Italy, driving it into the country a third time in a week was probably tempting fate and the Italian traffic police.

They spent about an hour in Livorno upon arrival, first buying a pair of shabby overalls from a worker he spotted leaving the port for the exorbitant price of 500 euro, then renting a motorbike and leaving it in Livorno as the backup getaway option for his intended evening trip, before taking a rental car eighty miles north to Portofino, a millionaire playground of a miniature port surrounded by hills, with the semicircular sweep of its cosy little harbour curving outward to meet the outlying gulf, where the boat was waiting for them at the pier. The other three or four big boat owners, mostly rich Arabs, were so surprised to see someone arrive at the Falcon that had been sitting there vacant for weeks that they even condescended to poking out of their floating palaces to nod their greetings.

The villa resemblance is reinforced once they have taken a tour of the inside, the big open-plan saloon on the main deck offering sweeping views of the outside, the only difference being touches of polished mahogany and decor accents in navy instead of grey or black to pay tribute to its maritime habitat. Selina can easily see how they could spend almost every spring and summer weekend here, cruising from one coastal town to another and just hanging around. But for now, there is no time for fun and relaxation. There may be for her, though she prefers to spend it doing her Italian practice, but Bruce goes to the bridge almost immediately to power up the engines and steer the Falcon out of the harbour, setting the course for the three-hour voyage back to Livorno.

The vicinity of a big cargo port may be a strange place for a pleasure craft to hang around, but Bruce has his reasons for this eccentric choice of cruising waters, even though it gives him the extra headache of finding a spot shallow enough to cast the anchor in, and far enough from commercial sea traffic arriving at and leaving the port: he needs to get inside the warehousing area adjacent to the port, and it is easier to bypass security by sea.

Since they agreed last night that he would start his on-site investigation in Italy, it was obvious that there were two angles of attack: trying to get into the Tessuti Varese premises in Prato, and trying to meet with Gianfranco, the son, again, but this time confronting him with whatever suspicious evidence Bruce and Theo may find by then. Given Gianfranco's reserved and reluctant manner earlier, all three of them are not sure if Gianfranco is in on the game, or an accomplice; the more facts they have to corner him with, the better, the most significant of which, besides the ownership and financial data they found, being potential evidence of Zhejiang Zili yarn, presumably packaged in Rongbaolin boxes, arriving at Tessuti Varese via Livorno. But to get that evidence, Bruce has to hurry: with the latest Chinese arrival, the COSCO Ningbo, having docked at Livorno two days ago, he has to get into the warehousing area, find the containers in question, and attach trackers to them before they leave port. Unloading a 9,500-container ship takes a few days, but there is no telling where exactly the containers are in the unloading order, and how fast they will move after that. If he fails, it will be a long two-week wait until the next ship arrives.

Once the Falcon is anchored outside Livorno they eat a quick dinner using supplies they brought on board; shortly after that Bruce, with the overalls and carefully applied grime smears on his face making him indistinguishable from an Italian docker, and carrying a toolbox containing the trackers, boards the motor dinghy to take it into the port. It should be dark by the time he reaches Livorno, making it easier for him to slip by and find the containers. Earlier in the day while they were in the middle of their travels, Theo was able to locate ten of these containers on the COSCO Ningbo cargo manifest, and was then able to give Bruce both their allocated portside storage area according to the unloading register and the exact GPS coordinates of that area, so what remains is for Bruce to find that spot and pick a good moment to stick the trackers on while staying undetected himself. The added complication is that the trackers have to be stuck to the top of each container, both to minimise the risk of detection and to maximise the power charge. Considering that these are active GPS devices that emit a regular ping regardless of being queried and have longer range than the mini-tracker in Selina's pearls, they are equipped with a miniature solar battery – an adhesive square of what looks like black film – that should make sure that the signal will carry for more than a dozen miles and last longer than a couple of days. They briefly toyed with the idea of using passive RFID tags instead of GPS, smaller and power- and placement-independent, but those would only be useful for as long as the containers travelled on the toll highway network, assuming that Theo would manage to hack into the network to locate their signal. The moment the containers got onto the last stretch of smaller regional and provincial roads leading into Prato and from there to the Tessuti Varese site, the RFID tags would fall silent.

Bruce comes back close to midnight after a successful mission – he was able to tag five out of ten containers, as they were stacked two high – and as soon as he has changed out of the overalls into the usual all-black, he prepares to leave again, this time to go seventy miles east on the rented motorbike still waiting for him in Livorno. Back in Lugano he did a quick Internet recon on Tessuti Varese using satellite view; the company occupies an industrial site in Castelletto, five miles west-northwest from Prato, with the inside of the roughly diamond-shaped area a quarter mile across looking like a few warehouses and a production facility. But there is no telling how recent the satellite image is, what changes may have taken place in the past weeks, and more importantly, what sort of security the site has; and for obvious reasons, Bruce needs to find that out.

The devices he takes with him this time are a smaller and much more curious kind, filling what looks like two dark-coloured cigarette packets: two swarms of bona fide metal insects, the smallest and most sophisticated of the miniature drones that Wainwright Security produces for government military clients. Seeing Selina's fascination with the tiny gadgets, he gives her a quick demonstration in the saloon: the first kind, a fake fly, is equipped with a propeller, a microscopic fish-eye camera, and a transmitter for the camera feed and operator commands; it looks a bit large for a regular fly, but in flight, is virtually indistinguishable from a large garbage fly or horse-fly at a distance of a few feet. The second kind, designed to take samples rather than video, is a fake cockroach with micro-suction pads on its feet that can navigate its way using a more primitive camera, travelling on surfaces up to a vertical 90-degree angle and, like its flying counterpart, obeying controls operated via wireless transmitter. He intends to drop them off, boxes and all, as close as practicable to the Tessuti Varese perimeter for later deployment: two of the limitations of these fantastic gadgets are that they have no night vision capability, making immediate internal recon impractical, and can only be effectively controlled over a short range of up to five or six miles, meaning that he cannot operate them later from Livorno or Portofino and will wait until he decides to move in on Tessuti, at which point he will go back there and get close enough to be in range for controlling the drones.

"I should be back in a couple of hours," he tells her. "Don't even think of leaving the boat on your own."

She scowls at the blatantly pointless warning; the Falcon is anchored a good half mile out to sea, and he is going to take the motor dinghy again. But she says nothing and asks nothing about worst case scenario options, just watches the boat leaving, then goes back into the saloon, powers up the huge TV, and stays up watching DVDs of some spy drama, only releasing her breath when she hears the dinghy approaching three hours later, close to 4 am.

"Did you stay up all this time?" Bruce asks suspiciously, seeing her camped out on the saloon couch.

"Doesn't matter," she retorts. "How did it go?"

"It went OK, but could have gone better," he shrugs. To his credit, by then he is sitting next to her, stroking her neck in a way that makes her forget about being angry at being left on the boat. "I dropped off the drone boxes out of camera range, but there was no way to get inside the fence, the way it's strung with heat sensors like Christmas lights, even if I managed to cut the barbed wire. Nothing sophisticated, but effective by way of sheer quantity. I suppose I'll wait until we talk to Gianfranco again to see if I have to fly the drones or can get in myself." Well, at least he is willing to have her along when talking to Gianfranco, not that she cares about _him_.

They go back to Portofino first thing in the morning and for two days after that, they stay in and around Portofino waiting for the tracker signals to move. In all this time she does not, in fact, leave the boat on her own – their dinner outing _à deux_ on the first evening doesn't count – except to dive off the aft deck for a swim when they cast anchor outside the harbour. But she discovers that there are plenty of ways to have fun on the boat so long as both of them are there; and that mind-blowingly good sex is only one of them. There is the al fresco dinner on the aft deck on the second evening, there is laughing at old pirate films they watch on the big screen in the saloon, there are midnight swims followed by stargazing from the hot tub or the couch on the upper deck… much as she would like the whole Varese matter to be resolved quickly, she also wishes they could have a few days of this life. Her wish is partially granted, but on the third morning of this happy existence all five containers leave the port warehouse and are tracked to Castelletto by mid-day.

.

Here is a final bunch of photo links until the last three chapters, to a few pictures of Falcon 115' motor yachts. I tried to find _one_ that I could imagine being theirs, but none of them has _quite_ the right décor; I just imagine it as a variation on, or mix of, the following. Asterisks=dots.

(http www) yachtworld*com/core/listing/photoGallery*jsp?ro=2&slim=quicknull&r=2454380&checked_boats=2454380&rs=yachtworld*com&boat_id=2454380&back=/core/boats/2006/Falcon-115-2454380/Greece&boat_id=2454380

also, same boat: (http www) superyachts*com/luxury-yacht-for-sale/falcon-115-1247/

(http www) yachtworld*com/core/listing/photoGallery*jsp?ro=1&slim=quicknull&r=2132471&checked_boats=2132471&rs=yachtworld*com&boat_id=2132471&back=/core/boats/2009/Falcon-115'-2132471/Viareggio/Italy&boat_id=2132471

(http www) yachtworld*com/core/listing/photoGallery*jsp?ro=1&slim=quicknull&r=1827110&checked_boats=1827110&rs=yachtworld*com&boat_id=1827110&back=/core/boats/2010/Falcon-RPH-115-1827110/Viargegio/Italy&boat_id=1827110

(http www) yachtworld*com/core/listing/photoGallery*jsp?ro=1&slim=quicknull&r=1986896&checked_boats=1986896&rs=yachtworld*com&boat_id=1986896&back=/core/boats/2012/Falcon-NEW-BUILDING-1986896/Italy&boat_id=1986896

Implied container ship specs, including capacity and travel times in the previous and a later chapter, and the GPS (satellite positioning) vs. RFID (short-range passive tag) tracking technology are pretty much as I hint. The insect drones may sound like pure sci-fi, but are a lot more real than it seems. I cannot remember where exactly I read about these 3-4 months ago, but the military do have something similar already.


	12. Taking the plunge

xxx

He may wear Brioni but the Varese family wealth probably does not quite extend to this kind of tonnage, Selina observes as she watches Gianfranco trying not to seem too awestruck upon arrival on board the Falcon. He does his best to act uninterested in and unimpressed by the beautiful boat, but instead of making him appear cool and sophisticated, it only makes him look sulky and vaguely comical. It might, of course, be due to the fact that Bruce is meeting with him on his own territory, having invited him to Portofino earlier in the day using wording that was just polite enough to mitigate the fact that it did not invite any argument.

Sitting in the saloon with Bruce and Selina and absent-mindedly sipping the Montepulciano, he waves away Bruce's superficially conciliatory apologies for the abrupt summons to ask directly about the reason and the urgency. He has obviously understood by now that Selina is not, or not _just_, a business colleague and Wainwright Security employee, but has made no comment on that. Interestingly, the change in Gianfranco's demeanour from their first meeting has an opposite effect on Bruce: he looks so relaxed, it is bordering on _pleased_.

"I was very saddened by your father's death," Bruce answers, the quiet, level tone doing nothing to conceal the inherent reproach. "And I took it upon myself to look very briefly into the situation around Tessuti Varese to see if, perhaps, there was anything that may have driven him to take his own life. Or may have otherwise resulted in his death." The undercurrent has moved from inherent reproach to inherent menace, casually icy instead of soft and pensive. "And after I'd had that quick look, I came away with a few questions, but also with enough facts to convince me that it wasn't caused by an allergy." Gianfranco's attempt to appear calm looks not far from crumbling.

"What do you mean?" Predictable; _and_ boring. But, she'll grant him, there aren't many options.

"One thing I found was that your father had a stake in a Chinese intermediary that, in turn, is the sole owner of a yarn producer." Clearly, Bruce has decided to start with the remotest, most innocuous charge and ratchet it up. "Which then apparently supplies yarn to Tessuti Varese through another intermediary, as I was able to verify this morning, having tracked their containers from Livorno to Castelletto. Which would be fine, except that from a cost perspective it makes little sense to involve two intermediaries in what would be a textbook case for upstream integration, even allowing for any tax benefit from the current arrangement; so there must have been other reasons why your father or his Chinese partners decided to keep it that way. Another thing I found is that the current majority owners of Tessuti Varese are ultimately owned by a holding company that also owns a pulp mill in central China that is a supplier of cardboard boxes to your father's Chinese investee and, for reasons I am happy to explain later, looks suspect on a number of fronts. And finally," Bruce sits back for the killer blow, cool, measured, impassive; an accountant from hell. He must have been a menace in the boardroom. "I have seen proof that your father's death was not from natural causes." He does not elaborate on this, the most serious charge, apparently keeping his promise to the scared doctor. "I believe that you, signor Varese, are aware of these facts, and I owe it to your father as a former client of mine to find out what exactly happened and why. Hopefully, with your help." The unsaid part is loud and clear; if you don't help, I'll find out anyway.

"I really don't know much about this, Mr Wainwright," Gianfranco ventures, in a frantic last-ditch attempt at plausibility. "I was never involved in my father's business –"

"_Non mi dire delle stronzate, _signor Varese," Bruce cuts him off sharply if still quietly. Selina bites down on a smile; if only Theo could hear his signature line delivered with such chilling flair, he would be proud.

Assuming that the verbal punch was calculated to throw Gianfranco off balance, it succeeds. He instantly turns from fake-confused to visibly pissed off and defensive.

"Why is it that you're digging this all up? What's in it for you, who are you working for? You installed the surveillance, we paid you, what more do you want?" There is something else lurking in his voice behind the veneer of anger; Selina has learned in her relatively brief but spectacular career to be a judge of people's mental states, and she can sense it now: _desperation_. But not the bitter desperation of a cornered culprit; more the frantic desperation of a kid scared to death. And apparently Bruce sees it, too.

She expects him to back down and try a different tack now, playing good cop to his own bad cop. But what he says is beyond her assumptions.

"I want justice for your father." He sits up, his face a few inches closer to Gianfranco's now; his shoulders are slumped and his voice quiet and lacking the ice shards. "Because no matter who exactly his murderers are, I'm probably the one who got him killed."

She has heard him imply it before, but watching him say it again does not hurt any less.

Desperate or not, she still half expects Gianfranco to go for his throat after that and half expects him to sag in relief at having another take the blame for his crime; but neither happens. He sits very still, and when he speaks next, it is just as quietly as Bruce just spoke before him.

"_Cosa vuoi dire?_" he asks again. He has switched from the formal third person to the informal second, either as a sign of contempt or a sign of trust.

Bruce does not seem to care which it is. Instead, he plunges ahead with telling Gianfranco the full story of their landing in Xining, and the fateful mention of Giacomo's name. When he has finished, the anger is gone from Gianfranco's face. If anything, he looks close to tears. And even more scared than before. But on balance, it looks like Bruce has called the right bet.

Gianfranco does not speak at once. When he does, his voice is shaky, and he stumbles over his words.

"I... appreciate you telling me this. I know it must be... trying for you, learning about his death after you mentioned his name. I can understand how you were... compelled to do it in a crisis. And as much as I'd _like_ to blame you, as much as it would be easier for me... I can't. I probably didn't do enough myself to try and talk him out of all this when it became clear that things were... dangerous... but I also know that the way he was, he wouldn't have listened until it was too late. The truth of the matter is, my father dug his own grave, and I don't know who could have stopped him."

It is Bruce's turn to say the quiet _What do you mean, _mirroring the second-person address.

"I'll tell you," Gianfranco volunteers, the fear creeping back into his face. "But you have to promise to stop and not try to investigate. If you don't, they'll kill me too, they'll kill us all."

She didn't expect to feel sorry for him a few minutes ago, but she does.

"Who?" she asks, joining the conversation for the first time.

"Wu and his men," Gianfranco explains readily. "They run everything there now, and they'll kill anyone who goes against them or who tries to expose them, whatever it is they're doing. My father tried that, and see what it got him. You're right, he didn't die of natural causes," he continues, turning back to Bruce. "He died after a business dinner with Wu and his deputy. The way he'd been opposing them for months before that, I still can't believe he went there. I told him not to go, Mother told him not to go, and he still did. He said he'd had enough of those bastards stealing his company from him, even if he'd invited them himself at the beginning. And he kept saying that he was going to find them out and go to the police. I think he even told _them_ that. Your mentioning his name in China may have been the last drop that confirmed to them that he was trying to dig up things on them, but it was a matter of days or at best weeks as it was, he was going to try it anyway. You were simply in the wrong place at the wrong time. So am I, so was my father."

For a while, none of them speaks. The confrontation over, the mood that has settled over them is somewhere between mourning and relief. Selina may be selfish, but she confesses inwardly that her feelings run more toward the _relief_ end of things.

"I can promise you that I won't do anything without talking to you first," Bruce replies eventually. "But I'd appreciate it if you told us what you know. There may be a way of getting them without endangering ourselves," he finishes. Most likely thinking about setting the Interpol on their trail from the Chinese end, Selina suspects. Hopefully without the need for him to go there.

And Gianfranco does tell them what he knows – it sounds like he tells them _all_ he knows, from the moment his father started looking for cash to top up the dwindling working capital when the banks weren't forthcoming and for a minority partner to hopefully help bring new business, or cheaper suppliers, or both, to a sluggish, old-fashioned company that he was too attached to to either drastically reorganise or sell off. He tells them about the first dealings with Wu, seemingly reasonable and businesslike and surprisingly ready with the money; about Wu's offer to invest 25% in Tessuti Varese in exchange for Varese's equivalent stake in Qindgao Jinglian, much smaller in monetary terms due to its mostly-empty balance sheet – Wu's stated reason was to procure beneficial tax treatment for Zhenjiang Zili, the wholly-owned subsidiary yarn producer, thanks to the foreign investment, but Bruce suspects that Wu's real reason must have been to make Varese the fall guy if anything went wrong. He finally tells them how Wu then brought in the Chinese fronts as the new majority owners after briefly convincing Varese that they were purely financial investors... and how, after his stake went down from 100% to less than a quarter in the space of a year, Giacomo Varese found himself a trespasser in his own company.

"I have no idea what it is they're doing, and I honestly don't know anything about the yarn or the boxes," Gianfranco goes on, "but Father said that within a month of getting majority, they fired all the old staff and locked access to the production facilities so that no one except them could go there, and put guards around the place. They called them the new workers, but Father said that these workers carried guns, and there were only a couple of them who actually knew anything about weaving and were seen around the weaving machines. And our production dropped to less than a quarter of the old rate but apparently they still got huge profits off the books, mostly from exports. They'd give us a cut, but it kept getting smaller over time, and they kept telling Father to sell the rest of his stake. I tried to talk to him and tell him that it was probably the only option, that we'd be better off out of there, we could always set up another business, but he was too angry at them for what he called ruining his company. The only time he listened and talked to them about selling, they offered him a quarter of the value of our stake, and there was no more talking to him after that, he just kept saying that he was going to the police to nab these robbers."

"I'm sorry," Selina says; she means it.

"I want to get these fuckers," Bruce says, and she is sure he means it, too.

Instead of arguing or pleading, Gianfranco just asks why.

"Your father may have been reckless, but I mentioned his name in China, and I'm not letting go of that." She is not sure if by now it is the reason or a pretext. "I can try and do so in a way that won't get you involved, but I admit that it would be easiest if we worked together."

To her surprise, Gianfranco does not argue; it is as if making the disclosure has helped him find a modicum of courage – or more likely, has reminded him again of the extent of the injustice. "But what can we do? I don't have any position in the company, and we can't even get into the site, it's become a fortress."

"What we can do," Bruce counters calmly, "is walk into their fortress, and ambush them right in it. You said that your father still held a minority stake when he was killed; is that right?"

"Yes."

"And they want to buy it out. They may think that you'll be so scared now as to hand it to them, or that you'll be so scared now as to stay out of it and not say a word even if you still hold it, which is just as good for their purposes. What we can do is make it look like you don't care about the company, or about what happened to your father," he suggests, and Selina is reminded of Gianfranco's attitude in their first meeting seemingly being just that, "and just want to get some money out of selling your stake before leaving them to it. It will give us a reason to contact them and hopefully get into the company site, as I don't think they'll want to discuss this in a public place or at their homes and you can say the same, and it'll make you look mercenary enough not to be a threat while tempting them the prospect of full control. I've mentioned that I speak Chinese, and if the Xining people talked to Wu he'll know it anyway, so I can go with you to translate. You have nothing to lose," he sums up, "in practice you've as good as lost it anyway, and this way we can bring them to justice. Besides," he adds, "I don't just install alarms, I have some... _hands-on security_ experience as well, so it may not be such a lost cause after all."

Gianfranco looks up at that last admission. "You don't seem like you're Mafia," he ventures.

"Never was," Bruce assures him. "But I've fought _against_ the Mafia, not here, in the States. Not unsuccessfully, I may add." She is amused at the newly respectful look in Gianfranco's face.

And now, she figures, is her chance. She may face an uphill battle trying to convince him on his own and in a more analytical state of mind, but now, with Gianfranco looking like he needs all the support he can get and with Bruce inspired by his own plan, is as good an opportunity as any.

"And if you need any expertise from the _other_ side of the law," she cuts in smoothly, ignoring Bruce's alarmed look, "I am a professional thief. Was, until a few months ago. Cat burglar, actually. A good one; you can ask _him_. And if there's any snooping around needed, I can do it while looking so stupid that they'll never know what hit them until it's over. And if there are any safes that need cracking, it's as good as done."

She can see Bruce preparing to shoot her down, and readies her killer weapon. "Besides, when we had our emergency landing in Xining, Brandon had to tell the Chinese that I was your fiancée having an affair with him to get me off the hook, didn't you, _caro_? It will make a perfectly plausible cover story."

The effect, if anything, is more devastating than she expected. Bruce just stares at her, dumbfounded by her stealthy offensive, his face a perfect illustration of an _et tu, Brutus _moment.

Gianfranco, however, is probably too encouraged by this discovery of a new and accomplished ally to realise the lapse of judgement he is about to commit. "I've never been so happy to discover I had a new fiancée," he beams. "I'm glad Chiara is still in Bali or else she'd be giving me –"

The look Bruce gives him in the next instant makes Selina wonder if Gianfranco is facing a swim in the harbour... or worse. In fact, she is glad that he has apparently managed to keep control of his bowels. "I mean... as a business partner," he bleats.

Bruce subjects him to the stare for two more long seconds before seemingly relenting.

"Just to make things clear," Bruce answers in a deceptively soft voice, "Céline here is _my_ fiancée, and she _only_ gets involved to the extent that is necessary." She does her best not to show how much she is savouring this. Apart from her strategic victory, being called his _fidanzata_, even as a deterrent to others, even if he will never actually propose and she does not expect him to, is quite flattering.

"The story will be that I insisted on being part of the talks because my family lent you money and I want to make sure that we get it back, and that I'm your pretend fiancée so Brandon and I can't do anything... _risky_ to avoid being found out, but we still carry on when you aren't watching," she cuts in before tempers get too frayed.

"And the reality is that she is my _real_ fiancée so _you_ can't do anything _risky_ either if you want to keep your balls," Bruce remarks, seemingly as an idle comment.

"Yes, of course," Gianfranco nods hurriedly.

"I'd bet there will be safes there that we may want to look into," she interjects to stop Gianfranco from ruining it with his fear of Bruce.

"I can figure out ways of opening a safe," Bruce mutters, still noticeably put out.

"Using what?" she presses.

"Explosives," he admits reluctantly, and she feels perfectly justified in making a face.

"_Quod erat demonstrandum_," she replies, unable to resist the taunt. She figures she'll make it up to him... later.

xxx

"_Insomma, ragazzi_," Bruce calls out to them from the bar where he is looking for a whisky bottle; given the alliance they've forged and the planning they've had to do, it probably isn't surprising that Gianfranco ended up staying for dinner; and to Selina's relief, he has managed to avoid tempting Bruce into chucking him overboard up to this point, "we have a day to get ready and just under two days before we meet in Prato." Before they sat down to dinner, Gianfranco called Wu to suggest a meeting to discuss the buyout, and to their relief, was given an appointment at Tessuti Varese on the afternoon of the day after next. "You meet Cèline at 1 pm at Santa Maria Novella, off the train from Milan. I meet you both at your house, and we go from there to Castelletto. In the meantime we go back to Lugano tomorrow, get Céline her Italian ID, get the fabric and the translation device, and you find a trustworthy girl with an industrial sewing machine and bring her to your villa by the time we're there. _Tutto chiaro_?"

"Yes, yes, it's all clear," Gianfranco responds. "Perhaps you could get me another one of those translation gadgets..?" he starts, but seeing Bruce's sour look, thinks better of it.

"With all due respect," Bruce retorts, pouring himself a tumbler, "Céline is a professional thief who knows her way around this kind of situation, and she'll manage to keep a poker face no matter what. I am not going to jeopardise our advantage by the risk of your eyebrows twitching when you hear something you aren't supposed to know the meaning of. You're getting the Kevlar, that should be good enough." Gianfranco purses his lips but decides not to press the point.

"The important thing to remember," Bruce concludes, "is to avoid any business dinners with Wu, or else we'll _all_ end up with a _severe peanut allergy_."

xxx

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As you may have guessed by now, the little pest is here to stay for a while; but he will be of some help. And the story of both the (real) Kevlar and the (fake) translation device will be explained in excruciating detail in the next chapter; consider yourselves warned ;)


	13. Mission prep

I have a sense of foreboding when posting this particular chapter that it is the final nail in the coffin of this as a readable piece of fiction. I admit it; this one is a gratuitous exercise in mega-geekery that is not absolutely indispensable to the plot. Then again, I hope to keep some of the Nolan!verse spirit in here, even though I summarily ditched the costume, and considering that I bring in Lucius, whom I adore, I can't leave out his trademark impenetrable techno jargon, if only for Bruce to poke fun at; and I know that the two people still definitely reading this to my knowledge may actually be amused. There will be a bit more of this kind in ch 15, but this one takes the cake. I'll try to type and post the following five-chapter sequence as closely together as I can this weekend before I deal with the aftermath next week.

.

As of the following morning, she has a different name again, for the next few days, at least; and Gianfranco Varese has a different fiancée. Instead of the sunny blonde Chiara Dametti, he will be courting sultry brunette Chiara Damiani, if _courting_ is the right term for _avoiding anything that might piss off her dangerous boyfriend_. They spent the better part of two hours after they flew back into Lugano at the Wainwright Security office, producing an Italian _carta d'identità _for her; as a paper booklet with limited security features, it is a lot easier to fake than a passport, and is a valid ID anywhere in Italy, should she need to show it. The legend they've concocted has her as a Piemontese, essentially a French-Italian who has lived most of her life in France, which should explain her fluent French and less-than-fluent and slightly French-accented Italian.

Once the document is ready they go out for lunch with Theo before they need to head out of town in the early afternoon. The conversation is lively but not uniformly so in all directions: Selina and Theo have no problem talking, nor do Theo and Bruce, but Selina and Bruce exchange relatively few remarks, and the tone of these is more reserved than usual, at least on his side; Bruce is still cross with her for cornering him into letting her in on the dealings with Wu, but cannot say so openly as otherwise he would invite taunts from her suggesting that it is his jealousy talking. For once Theo is not picking up on this dynamic, too preoccupied with the idea of the two of them galloping off to take on Wu & co on their own, with minimal resources and no one more capable than poor scared Gianfranco for support. Needless to say, the remotest suggestion of his participation is immediately dismissed by Bruce invoking his kids; Selina is glad she does not have any, or else she suspects he would have locked her up inside a vault sooner than let her join him.

"I wish you would wait a few days, Brandon," Theo persists, giving Bruce an accusing look; he does not need to be told whose idea this urgent plan is. "I'm waiting for the China NCB contact to get back to me on the intermediaries and on the beneficiary owners of the fronts, and for our boys here to get the full lists of COSCO ship schedules and ports of call so we can cross-reference the yarn shipments to them. Of course it would be good to get this Wu's fingerprints so I could ask for a proper database check on him, but with a bit more time, you can probably get them without locking yourselves in there. And then we could just ship it all out to the Carabinieri to take care of."

"If we wait a few days we'll never know when they start suspecting something and change their routine enough to hide it from us," Bruce argues. "Or if they decide to kill Gianfranco in the meantime. You yourself said that the Italian law enforcement is hard to mobilise because there are two agencies to deal with. We can get in and get the evidence we need and _then_ wait for them to move."

"You could probably get enough evidence if you just unleash our happy little hornets' nest on them without going in yourself," Theo counters.

"The drones?" Bruce replies, smirking. "Don't worry, I already have them sitting right outside their fence in two cigarette packets waiting to be switched on. But we'll get more info if we go in first, map the premises and then send them in. Saves battery power, too, meaning we won't have them wasting it on unnecessary detours so we can get more footage of the parts we need to see before the battery dies. Besides," he adds, "Wu gave us the appointment already, if we stand him up he'll know something's off. And we'll have the Kevlar to keep us each in one piece."

"Which doesn't protect against head shots," Theo reminds him grimly. "But it's better than nothing. Are you sure this supplier of yours is any good? You should have told him to come here with the fabric, we could have run tests on it in our lab to check that it has the ratings he claims..."

"I'm sure he's good," Bruce promises him. "I've dealt with him before, he's reliable, works on major US defence contracts. And he can't come here, he is only at the airbase for a couple of days and has a full agenda. He sent me the basic specs on the Kevlar, it looks quite impressive, high resistance and less... _obvious_ than the usual kind. I'll find out more when we meet."

"The best thing to do would be see if you can get your hands on any of the stuff Wayne Enterprises makes. From what I hear, they've been looking into enhancing Kevlar properties for ultrathin body armour, and their research capability is legendary, so if anyone has top-of-the-line fabric, it's them. Perhaps you could use the Wayne contacts you got those micro-propeller drone engines from, or maybe this guy you're meeting can help you. I know there's very little time left, but still."

"I'll see what I can get," Bruce replies, straight-faced. Sitting next to him, Selina is doing her best to keep that famous poker face of hers, which is an uphill battle considering that she knows that _this guy _Bruce is meeting is the Wayne CEO. "I don't expect us to get into prolonged gunfights out there, anyway."

"Just don't do anything _too _stupid," Theo tells him with a hint of a scowl. "I need my star consultant back alive," he continues, tipping his head to Selina. "And I'd rather you came back too. I don't want to think of the possibility of this company having a different owner."

xxx

They leave right after lunch, after they agree that Bruce will drop off their villa keys, cell phones and her tablet – he is taking his laptop to Prato – and any other remaining compact valuables at the office in the morning for safekeeping, and pick up car keys from Theo – with the Sesto being too obvious, he is lending Bruce his spare car to drive to Prato this time. But for now, they are once again in the Sesto, headed east to the US Air Force European airbase at Aviano, just over two hundred miles east of Lugano near the Slovenian border.

"Will it help if I say I'm sorry?" she ventures when they have been in the car for the better part of half an hour and barely said two words to each other. It was the same on the plane earlier that morning.

"Depends on whether you get back in one piece," is the muttered reply.

"I have no intention of getting myself killed or otherwise fucked up." Not unless _you_ have that intention, anyway. "I really think I can help."

"I have _no doubt_ you can help," he answers, his voice slightly more animated. "But it's a question of risk and reward. I still say the risk is too great."

"By that logic, it's just as great for you. You can't judge the two of us by a different measure, Bruce, I didn't spend years chasing criminals in Gotham, but I've faced down plenty of them, in prison and out. It's only fair that we share the risk now."

"Fair, maybe. I just don't like it. I'd rather know that you're safe than walk into danger with you."

OK, at least he is talking now. "Guess what, I feel the same. But I think if we do it together, our chances of getting out are better than otherwise. I actually think our chances aren't really that bad," she ventures, doing her best to sound more convinced than she feels.

"You're forgetting the great variable of Gianfranco fucking it up for all of us," Bruce replies wryly. "I believe he's honest with us now, but I still don't trust him not to do something incredibly stupid at the worst possible moment."

She allows herself a laugh. This is as close to being forgiven as she'd hope for. "Well, if he does, I'll be right next to you kicking his ass."

He gives a somewhat exaggerated sigh. "It's a deal." Apparently, he has finally given up on being angry with her.

By then they have reached the Milan ring road and are crawling along with the traffic before heading east. "Theo was right, you should have just asked Lucius to come to Lugano," she mutters when they have moved less than half a mile in a minute.

"There are two reasons it's not the best option," Bruce counters. "First, if that happened it would be difficult to manage things in a way that he and Theo wouldn't cross paths, like the lunch today – I couldn't tell Lucius to go have lunch on his own, and I'd promised Theo we'd go out for a bite. I don't want to think of what will happen if those two meet. Even if Lucius plays along, it'll be as good as writing _Bruce Wayne_ on a post-it note and sticking it to my forehead, and I'd rather not let it come to that."

She wonders wryly how long Bruce will manage to keep this two-timing status quo, but chooses to say nothing.

"And second," he continues, "I'd like to see the new plane he's flying here. He's pulled strings in the Pentagon thanks to the Tumbler and Bat helicopter contracts to let him land it in Aviano under the pretence of a test flight. Lugano is too small for it to land, not to mention Swiss and thus non-NATO, and Milan Malpensa has no military base."

She simply shakes her head in response. He'll never grow out of fast-vehicle toys.

xxx

"Liar," she turns to Bruce accusingly, once she has managed to move her jaw again. The way it dropped a full inch a few seconds ago was rather embarrassing, but luckily, he was not watching her.

Bruce turns to her now, all innocence and wounded virtue.

"You _do_ own a space shuttle," she insists, by way of an explanation. Once they were past the security perimeter with the passes Lucius had procured for them collected at the gate and had reached the airfield, she was in no doubt about which _new plane_ Bruce was referring to, in spite of the two squadrons' worth of F16 Fighting Falcons sitting there. The F16 is a beautiful plane for sure, but the gleaming fat needle with its backswept slanted wings seeming little more than a forward extension of stabiliser fins is truly out of this world. Even for her not being as mad about military toys as Bruce, it was worth the nearly three-hour drive to see it.

Bruce looks relieved at the reason for her accusation, and actually has the gall to look mischievously pleased. "The operative words were, as I recall, _not to my knowledge_. It was still in the early stages of prototype development when I... _left_. And no, it doesn't fly in space, it stays in the stratosphere," he concludes, as if the revelation made the craft less impressive.

"Still the fastest thing to carry a human that isn't rocket-propelled," Lucius says from behind them. They were too busy gawking at the plane to notice him walk up. "I left Gotham half an hour after you left Lugano, and I still beat you here by more than an hour," he says, grinning. "Selina?" He has finally put two and two together as to who Bruce's companion is; understandable considering he has only seen her face to face once, and she was wearing a mask. Apparently, the name of _Céline Caille_ did not ring a bell immediately, and Bruce did not tell him who exactly he was bringing along. "Good to see you again! I was right then, wasn't I?" he continues, winking at her.

She remembers it, his throwaway line back in Gotham, at the height of the war. _I like your girlfriend, Mr Wayne_. Lucius knew it before either of them did. "Well, he _is_ a lucky guy," she admits, smiling back at him.

"What are you two talking about, taking bets on me?" Bruce questions them, looking from one to the other.

"Not quite. Lucius took a bet on _me_ about half a year ago. You probably don't remember, but he called me your girlfriend back then," she explains.

Interestingly, Bruce looks like he _does_ remember. "He was a few months early, that's all," he counters, shaking his head the tiniest bit.

"How fast does it fly?" Selina asks, eyeing the plane again once they are past the hugs and back pats.

"Mach 5.5," Lucius supplies, unhelpfully. "About four thousand miles an hour," he clarifies. "It's called hypersonic, as opposed to _super_sonic, which was, up to now, the fastest manned non-space aircraft. It flies with a pulse detonation engine; instead of burning fuel, it effectively explodes it in a continuous series of micro-explosions, thousands of pulses per second. The engine has no moving parts and much higher efficiency than a conventional jet. And now that we've reached optimum mixing of fuel and oxidiser, we are at a weight and cost level sufficient to enable production past the experimental prototype stage. For a start, we're working on a long-range, high-speed recon aircraft that flies high enough to be out of range of any current defences. That's what this one is," Lucius gestures to the needle. "Ours is the only viable prototype now that both competing military projects, the Blackswift and the Borealis, have been mothballed. After that we are thinking of producing commercial planes. We're way ahead of NASA and the other manufacturers like GE and Pratt & Whitney in terms of developing and testing this. I daresay Wayne Enterprises is going to be a household name in a few years' time," he concludes with a proud smile.

Strangely, Bruce seems less than unequivocally delighted at the prospect.

"Unless we beat you to it," he parries, looking sideways at Lucius; she cannot quite tell how serious he is.

"We?" she questions him.

"Bruce's English researchers," Lucius explains to her. "Don't know if he told you that he owns an outfit called Reaction Engines Limited in Oxfordshire." So _that's_ the research facility he mentioned back at their first dinner. "They've been working on an alternative to the pulse detonation engine for hypersonic travel called a precooled jet engine. Ever heard of something called Scimitar?" he asks Selina.

She shakes her head. "Nope. Only the sword kind."

"It's part of the research for the European LAPCAT programme for commercial hypersonic flight," Bruce takes his turn to explain. "They've developed a lab scale precooler and tested it successfully under representative conditions. Doesn't fly yet, but it's a matter of months. The issue is the amount of liquid hydrogen it needs, but it's going to be a lot quieter than the pulse detonation kind. Don't know if you're managed to deal with it, Lucius," he continues, almost-tauntingly, "but last time I heard, it sounded like a giant jackhammer."

"We're working on it," Lucius concedes. "It's better already than you last heard. And it's still as fast," he finishes, grinning again.

"Have you flown in this?" Selina asks, turning to Bruce.

He looks somewhat crestfallen. "Not yet. Lucius wouldn't let me until he was sure they'd dealt with all the glitches so it wouldn't explode mid-air. Now that you're flying it yourself, Lucius, it's only fair that you let me try it."

"I need to think about it," Lucius answers coyly. Bruce mock-glares at him but does not press the point.

"So how's your Swiss company doing, _Mr Wainwright_?" Lucius asks when they finally walk away from the aeronautical wonder to go look at the Kevlar inside the office compound. "Did he tell you I helped him develop his company's business and set up his alter ego ten years ago?"

"He helped me set up _both of them_," Bruce jumps in. "This one _and_ the Batman. I'd picked the name, but all the Wainwright documented backstory that was added after that is _his_ doing, and so far it's holding up nicely," he finishes, before answering Lucius. "We're doing fine. It isn't anywhere as big as Wayne, will never be, but it's doing good business, and I like what we're working on. I've brought you some of our toys to take a look, I'll show you later."

"Can't wait." Lucius seems to have a habit of grinning at Bruce, like an indulgent uncle watching a favourite nephew. "Right now, I think I recognise one of my toys that I made for you a long time ago," he continues, tipping his head fractionally at Selina's pearls. "I once put a mini GPS tracker into the clasp of this necklace at Bruce's request."

"I know," Selina answers him. "It's still there. I have _you_ to thank for him asking me to dance, then. You see, the first time we met in a... _non-business_ setting, he surprised me at a party to take this necklace back from me."

"Back?" Lucius repeats.

"I'd... _borrowed_ them first, before he actually gave them to me." Which means that the pearls have brought them together twice already.

"Ah. I forgot you were good at _other things_ besides fighting." Lucius can't help the smirk.

"Yes I am, that's what I have to keep reminding him about when he tries to keep me out of this. Safecracking, all kinds of theft, generally snooping around..."

"And taking prints," Bruce adds. She cannot tell if he is being literal or sarcastic, but is glad that he no longer sounds sulky when her participation is brought up.

"Well, I've brought something for you that should help you in the _snooping around_ department," Lucius says, turning to her, when they are inside the temporary office he has commandeered at the base. "Bruce told me you needed something that would provide instant automatic translation from spoken Chinese without the speakers knowing about it, and of course he knows that we've developed just the thing for the CIA." He takes a cigarette packet-like object out of his silver titanium briefcase, and she wonders if all spy gadgets come packaged in cigarette-packet-sized cardboard. "Basically, the technology, or its components, have been around for a while, things like speech recognition and voice synthesis software and online translation engines and Bluetooth in-ear speaker-microphones. We just put it together in one package, and fine-tuned the software to make it focus on a chosen language while filtering out the rest and reduce the error percentage enough to make it useful." Once he has taken out the contents, the gadget looks like a couple of commonplace items, a pink silicone in-ear speaker, like a miniature hearing aid, and a chip unit the size of a mini mp3 player. "You switch it on here," he shows her a sliding switch on the chip unit, "and the speaker activates automatically. I have Mandarin speech recognition and English voice synthesis software preloaded, assuming that Chinese is the most important language you need to understand, but I can switch it for Italian if I got it wrong."

"No, you got it right. I've been practicing Italian for the past month and a half, I can actually understand it pretty well by now," she reassures him. "Can I try it out?"

"Of course," Lucius pulls up his laptop and calls up a Chinese radio station site. "In fact, I suggest that you practice between now and your meeting so you know exactly what it's like. But first," he continues, opening his briefcase again and pulling out what looks like a plastic-wrapped quilted golden cushion before ripping off the plastic and letting the fabric spill on the desk in loose folds, "let me show you the other thing I've brought for all of you."

This, then, must be the much-vaunted Wayne Kevlar – her cat burglar suit, just like Bruce's Batsuit, was made of the black-coated variety, but she knows enough to remember that gold is the natural, untreated Kevlar colour. The shiny quilted fabric looks surprisingly flimsy and soft; she knows that Kevlar is used for sports clothing and boat sails and the like, but she would have thought that body armour would look, well, bulkier and sturdier.

"Does this stop bullets?" she asks, unable to contain her incredulity.

"Does it _ever_," Lucius says with more than a touch of pride. "This isn't ordinary Kevlar, it's a composite material based on woven Kevlar fabric, with enhanced ballistic resistance and higher dimensional stability to achieve shallower impact profiles. We use plain-woven Hexcel Aramid, high performance 600 denier Kevlar KM-2, and a shear thickening fluid based on colloidal silica provided as a water suspension, but as a means of preparing a stable concentrated dispersion we replace water in the suspension with ethylene glycol, a solvent, and then add an equal volume of ethanol to aid the impregnation of the fluid into the fabric. The composite fabric is first heated to remove the ethanol, and the ethylene glycol is then removed by drying the fabric at even higher temperature, leaving only the silica particles dispersed within the individual fibers in the fabric yarn. To prevent leakage of the silica, and because Kevlar is known be sensitive to moisture, we encapsulate the impregnated Kevlar layers in heat-sealed polyethylene film, and cover the film with a layer of untreated Kevlar on either side."

She has a strange sensation of listening to a foreign language she has studied but not quite mastered; she can make out individual words and just enough of the overall meaning, but large chunks of it still escape her. "What's shear thickening?"

Lucius seems oblivious to the fact that his audience does not share his double PhD in physics and chemistry. "In scientific terms, it's a non-Newtonian flow behaviour characterised by significant increase in viscosity with increasing shear stress. It is a reversible process that can induce dramatic changes in suspension microstructure, and induce highly nonlinear behaviour. At low strain rates that occur with normal motion, the fluid won't restrict movement. But at the high strain rates that happen at ballistic impact, the fluid will thicken and in doing so, act as a shield. The fluid forms jamming clusters resulting from hydrodynamic lubrication forces between particles, so-called hydroclusters. This instant liquid-to-solid transition makes a lot of difference is in energy absorption and dissipation, so the treated Kevlar has superior ballistic impact and penetration resistance without any added bulk or loss in flexibility."

"Am I supposed to understand any of this?" Bruce challenges him; Selina is relieved to hear that she is not the only relatively-clueless listener.

"No." Lucius's grin grows wider. This must be something of a running joke between the two. "The only thing you really need to know is that the ballistic performance of the eight layers of impregnated Kevlar used in here is the same as that of a standard 20-layer Kevlar vest, but as you see it's much more flexible and has half the thickness of the 20 layers at only one-tenth of an inch, so there's no bulk to show. You can both make vests to wear next to the torso and stitch this into the lining of your suits to give you double protection that won't be visible and won't trip any detectors. It should be enough to protect against medium-velocity bullets, from handguns and most submachine guns; there may be bruising, but no internal organ damage. Hopefully you won't run into rifle rounds."

Now that Lucius has explained it in practical terms, she is impressed. Basically, he is giving them functional body armour in the shape of a thin layer of lining. She finally understands the logic behind Bruce's seemingly absurd request to Gianfranco to bring a girl with a sewing machine to his Prato villa; when he mentioned it earlier, she had a hard time imagining the concepts of _bulletproof Kevlar_ and _sewing machine_ in the same context.

Even Bruce seems to regard the Kevlar with a sense of wonder, judging by the way he is fiddling with a corner, feeling the flimsy fabric.

"Do you want to try it out?" Lucius asks.

"No, I trust you," Bruce concedes. "I'm curious, but I don't want you to raise eyebrows at the base by first asking for a gun and then firing it. Let me show you something _we_'ve made to help us there," he offers, pulling out his own supply of cigarette-packet packaging, which Selina recognises as the drone containers. "Since Wayne mothballed the sonar research because of its privacy infringement potential, we've gone a different route at Wainwright, as you probably remember, and started developing our spy tools as standalone purpose-built units. I'll leave you these two boxes for your entertainment, but first, let me show you."

Selina, who has already seen these in action, or at least in motion, goes to an adjacent room to test out the Chinese translator – and while Bruce and Lucius play around with what Theo called a happy little hornets' nest, she listens to a few minutes of the Chinese radio station broadcast – and is impressed. It is not 100% perfect; there is the occasional glitch or phrase that makes no sense in English, but that should probably be expected with a tonal language where the same combination of sounds can mean radically different things depending on the tone it is pronounced in. Still, without speaking a word of Chinese, she can understand the majority of what is being said, and both the speaker and the smooth generated voice it emits are comfortable enough for her to imagine listening to it all day.

By the time she is done with trying it out and returns to the other room, Bruce and Lucius are also done playing their recon games; she makes it back just in time to hear them discuss subsequent arrangements, and learn about a welcome change of plan. Lucius, apparently concerned for their safety and able to smoothly present it, not unlike Selina, as a series of arguments about the utility of his skills, has just called his senior contact at the Pentagon to request authorisation for him to land the hypersonic at Pisa Galileo after a short jump. Luckily for them, the airport nearest to Prato has a large military contingent in addition to the civilian operations, and the Italian Air Force authorities must have been curious enough to see the craft to have granted flyover and landing permission quickly and without any hassle. Lucius cannot come to stay in Prato for fear of the Chinese tailing them, but this way he will maintain a mobile office at Pisa airport for the duration of their stint, assuming that it will be over in less than a week, under the pretence of taking an impromptu long weekend in Italy, a privilege that he rarely permits himself despite being a CEO of an industry giant. Selina does her best to express her thanks to him before they part company that evening after a quick dinner at the airbase canteen, the two of them bound back for Lugano and Lucius about to fly to Pisa; nominally her gratitude is just for the Kevlar and the gadget, but judging by the way Lucius looks her in the eye, he understands the full meaning.

xxx

Before they leave for Italy for the fourth time in two weeks the following morning, she gives Bruce her cell phone to hand over to Theo in the office, but not before she has scribbled the PIN code on the battery inside. Theo does not need to know it yet, but this way she can always tell him later where to look without needing to disclose the code over an unsecure connection; in the worst case, if she does not get a chance, he'll figure it out sooner or later if need be. And Bruce doesn't need to know that she is prepared to tell Theo the code, or _why_ she is prepared to do so; he doesn't need to know that she has typed up a memo on it with her bank account details, stating that in the event of her death, the money in the accounts should go to the Wayne Foundation. She has no time for a formal will, but hopes that it will be admissible in lieu of one. If she doesn't make it back, she wants Bruce to know that he has, indeed, made her a better person, that he has made her care, even if she isn't sentimental enough to write a confession of love to Bruce himself and thinks that he wouldn't be either, even if it is probably true for both by now.

He is waiting for her downstairs to set the alarms, lock the house and take both their keys to the office together with the rest while she takes the bike to the Lugano train station. She stops in front of a mirror on the upper landing before joining him, and is struck by the same déjà vu moment for the second time in six weeks. Same girl, same town this time, same necklace. But instead of heading out for a date with a man miraculously returned from the dead, she is heading out for what will be arguably the most dangerous, and certainly the least materially profitable, caper of her life.

.

The Aviano airbase is the NATO/US Air Force in Europe base in Italy, hence I used it as Lucius' arrival point. The Pisa airport does, indeed, double as a military airbase.

Info on both pulse detonation engines and hypersonic craft in general is scarce and vague and refers a lot to prototypes and mothballed projects; but it is a known fact that hypersonic craft have been tested successfully once or twice, and _un_successfully most recently this July, when the thing blew up somewhere over the Pacific. Reaction Engines Ltd in Oxfordshire is a very real company; but needless to say, rather than belonging to Mr Wainwright, it largely belongs to its founder, Alan Bond, and indeed works on developing a Scimitar precooled jet engine for the European LAPCAT II hypersonic flight project.

The translator gadget is fake as such, but is feasible in principle; it would be a simple matter of pairing up existing speech recognition software with a translation engine – if you've used Google Translate you'll know it isn't that bad. The practical difficulty would be the percentage of error in speech recognition, though I suspect that something like this may actually turn up several years down the line. I basically gloss over that and assume that it lets Selina understand the gist.

The info on Kevlar, including the silica impregnation technology, was lifted from actual scientific research. I don't expect anyone to be so profoundly masochistic as to read a 9-page paper on Kevlar treatment, but just to show where I got the gist of Lucius' Kevlar geekery from, here is the link. (http www) ccm*udel*edu/STF/PubLinks2/BallisticImpactCharacteristi csofKEVLAR*pdf


	14. Tessuti Varese

xxx

"You drove down in _this one_? _Seriously_?" She is not even trying to keep the mockery out of her voice. In fact, she is playing it up for all it's worth. Bruce waiting for them outside Gianfranco's villa in a Renault Scénic is probably the most bizarre sight she has seen in weeks. It _is_ black, granted, but it looks like the most innocuous, boring, ordinary car imaginable, an opposite of Bruce himself. She is momentarily sorry that she had to take the train into Florence to maintain her cover story as Gianfranco's fake fiancée just in case the Chinese are keeping an eye on him; travelling with Bruce in _this_ car must have been a priceless comical treat.

Strangely, Bruce seems completely unruffled. "It's not as bad as it looks."

She senses the mischief in his voice. "Anything I don't know?"

He is all but grinning at her, but tries to maintain the mystery. "You're welcome to take a look. See if you can spot it."

She takes a casual stroll around the Scénic; it looks the way she thinks a Scénic should. She climbs into the driver's seat and holds out her hand to Bruce for the keys; if it isn't some external feat of camouflage or other hi-tech modification, it _must_ be the engine – and while looking at it may give her clues, she won't really figure it out unless she starts it.

"Careful," he says, dropping the keys into her palm. So that's it, then.

She almost jumps at the smooth, low, powerful rumble when she turns the key. The damn thing sounds like a Ferrari. Even more oddly, the engine sound comes from behind her.

She turns to Bruce, the engine still running in idle. "What have you got in it – and where _is_ it?"

He finally laughs out loud. "Switch it off and get out, I'll show you."

A few seconds later, she stands and stares in amazement at the gleaming beauty of a V12 engine seemingly taking up the entire bottom of the storage space in the back of the car, camouflaged below a cover of carpeting. No wonder it sounds like a Ferrari; it is powered like one.

"It's Theo's toy car," Bruce explains. "He has a BMW for everyday driving and a Range Rover for the family, but this one is his prank favourite. He suggested a race when I had recovered enough to drive the Sesto, and kept insisting no matter how much I kept mocking him. Of course I had no idea about the engine. I must admit I had an eye-popping moment when he got ahead of me in the first five seconds. I still won," he smirks, "but it was a hell of a race."

Finally, it all makes sense. Just like the predatory Sesto is all Bruce, this prank on wheels is all Theo, innocuous... until it pounces.

"This, from a man who hates bullshitting," she says, half accusing, half admiring.

"He may hate bullshitting, but he has nothing against pranks. Especially when he is the one pulling them."

"You know, I actually like the idea a lot," she muses, turning to Bruce. "I wonder if a V12 will fit inside a Cinquecento without it crumbling to the ground..."

xxx

"_Ma che cazzo è?_" Gianfranco exclaims, his voice a mixture of incomprehension and awe. They are huddled in front of a coffee table with Bruce sitting in the middle, carefully tracing a finger along the touchpad of his laptop, manoeuvring the fly drone over Tessuti Varese territory; Gianfranco knows the site well enough to recognise where the camera feed comes from, but cannot fathom how the moving image is obtained. It is slightly grainy, but still of sufficiently good quality to make out the buildings and structures. Thankfully, with the villa bristling with Wainwright-installed gadgetry, they do not need to worry about safety or the secrecy of what they are doing, saying, or looking at, so long as they are inside.

"A little spying before we go in there. Think of it as a flying camera," Bruce explains succinctly. "I wanted to see if the place had changed compared to the satellite image I saw, so long as we have time." They still have almost an hour before their scheduled meeting, and are waiting for the girl – another Chinese, but positively angelic-looking, and, according to Gianfranco, beyond suspicion – to finish stitching in the Kevlar lining under the regular lining of their suits; she has already finished the vests, and apparently is none the wiser about the properties of the fabric she is handling, having been told that it is thermal insulation; they've warned her to run her machine slowly, but did not elaborate that the slow speed was needed to stop the fabric from hardening at the needle hits.

"I can tell you it's changed," Gianfranco states. "These two warehouses weren't there before." He points a finger to the screen as the image pans across the factory yard. "These four were always there, I think it's two for yarn and two for rolls of finished fabric, but I have no idea what these new ones are."

"Anything else?" Bruce prompts.

"Apart from the goons with guns, you mean?" Gianfranco seems to be picking up Bruce's vaguely sarcastic manner. Well, it is better than trembling in fear. "Not that I can see. Can you swivel the camera around to look at the factory again?"

Bruce does as requested; the building that comes into view is long and low, with its central two-storey portion jutting above the one-storey flanks. He strokes the touchpad again, signalling for the drone to move closer. "See anything yet?"

"No, looks the same as I last remember it. Whatever they've changed must be on the inside." He walks over to a side cupboard and takes out a sheaf of old design drafts, pulling one on top of the rest, showing a long gallery-like room with twin rows of weaving machines along each side. "This is the way it was last redesigned in the late eighties, and once we've been there, we'll see what's different now."

"OK, we'll look at it later." They agreed, at Bruce's suggestion, to crudely map the inside of the building first before sending in drones to avoid wasting too many of them –each of them is capable of about half an hour of powered flight and would normally be rechargeable, but they realise that they have to treat these as disposable not knowing if they'll be able to retrieve them afterwards. "Check with your seamstress if she's done, we need to get out of here in half an hour."

xxx

Castelletto, at the end of their six-mile drive, looks like a regular industrial area, a fence surrounding a cluster of warehouses bordered on three sides by agricultural fields and on the east by a road. As per Bruce's nighttime recon five days ago, the new owners have installed enough security to discourage snooping – she has spotted a few ordinary cameras and plenty of passive infrared sensors on the outside perimeter just under the barbed wire coils on top of the high fence, not to mention the armed guards they saw on the camera feed – but hopefully, none of their surveillance is hi-tech enough to pick up on the sophisticated gadgets they are sneaking in; the afternoon's unnoticed drone fly-by was encouraging already.

The iron gate is flanked by a guard post, and they are asked to leave their cars in the tiny parking area outside the gate and walk in through the guarded entrance, passing through a metal detector as they do so. Even without knowing for sure, Bruce prepared for the eventuality, and brought the stack of X-rays that has become his customary alibi in dealings with airport scanner staff. She has seen it all before, but it never stops making her cringe. With the guard now taking his time examining each sheet, she is treated to the before-and-after shots again in their gory glory. Three lumbar vertebrae, screws in his left wrist, a titanium plate on his left kneecap, titanium strips on half a dozen ribs that had cracked with the landing impact... she is only responsible for the first item in the morbid catalogue, but it is bad enough; and not being responsible for the rest does not make it much better, either. She swears to herself that if he mentions heli-skiing again, she'll put up a proper fight. But for now, the little horror show has an important purpose as a distraction technique.

She watches Bruce very casually shrug off his suit jacket to let the guard pass the handheld scanner over his back, where it buzzes, predictably, over the titanium vertebrae... the guard conveniently oblivious to the hidden pocket in the back of the jacket lining where he has put Selina's translation gadget. She could try to smuggle it in in her handbag claiming that it is an mp3 player, but the risk of being found out made them choose the safer alternative, and seeing the other guard peer and poke inside her handbag now makes her glad they did so. It's enough that her bag holds what appears to be a makeup kit and is in reality a carefully camouflaged fingerprint dusting kit, with magnetic and fluorescent dusting powder masquerading as a monochromatic eyeshadow set and rather garish pink blusher, a UV light posing as a mascara tube, and seemingly innocent makeup brushes doubling as print powder applicators, complemented with a business card case holding plastic-backed tape strips and backing cards mixed in among actual business cards. But these are all so cleverly disguised as to arouse no suspicion, and the chunky onyx ring on her right hand is small enough to set off no alarms that might alert anyone to the carbide glass cutter wheel hidden behind the large stone. Still, she is glad that they have kept gadgets to a minimum; none of them carries a laptop, and all she and Bruce have by way of mobile communication is a pair of simple, clean cell phones with fake contact lists and call records pre-loaded the day before; it's good enough that Theo is keeping an eye on their GPS positions, but there are no fancy tricks inside. With this bunch, they'd better be safe than sorry and better underplay their hand than trigger suspicion.

Having completed his X-ray routine and explained to the guard about the bad car accident that had apparently caused his injuries – she cannot understand his Chinese without the gadget, but knows his usual excuse – Bruce puts the final flourish on it by pulling up his left trouser leg to show the guard the knee brace. The guard looks, waves his hand, and lets Bruce off the hook; what he does not know is that Bruce intentionally did not tighten the brace enough to let him walk normally, and is showing the full extent of the limp: if the worst comes to the worst and they do have to fight their way out, it will be best to have his full fighting ability with the brace properly locked as an unexpected advantage. She hopes it does not come to that, but agrees with the principle.

Still, it is unlikely that any of this will be needed this same afternoon. The meeting they are about to go into is purely an introduction, a gambit to open negotiations that should, with any luck, continue tomorrow and give them enough time to gather damaging evidence and figure out what the hell it is that Tessuti Varese is now making, or trading in, and who they are selling it to. Gianfranco and Bruce still think that the stuff is drugs, or possibly pharmaceuticals; she is less convinced, but then, she has had fewer encounters with substance smuggling than Bruce.

The scrutiny over, they are led past the warehouses and across the yard to the main building. The guard workers have apparently been told to stay out of the way; they are either inside the warehouses or hovering just outside the warehouse entrances, so the three of them and one of the three gate guards are the only people walking around. Inside the factory building, there is a corridor running the entire length of the production floor along the right side – looks like 150 feet or so. It looks like the production workshops are in a straight line along the corridor and have side doors that are supposed to open onto it, but those doors seem locked. The only entrance that opens – just for a few seconds at that – is a wide double-door gateway opening into the shorter, 30-foot corridor branching off immediately to the left along the short wall; there is a corresponding gateway in the outside wall across the corridor, and the two sets of gates open to admit a motorised cart carrying yarn spools; they have to wait just inside the building entrance for it to pass. Once the gate is closed again, the guard leads them to the end of the short corridor, where a right turn leads onto a single long flight of stairs to the upper floor along the back wall. She hopes to get another glimpse of the production room on the way back; maybe she can play stupid and pretend to be curious.

The upper floor offices, built above the production floor to avoid the noise, are also arranged in a row along a corridor, this one running on the left-hand side the entire length of the upper floor –looks to be a hundred feet rather than the ground-floor one-fifty. There are seven windows along the wall on the left-hand side and six doors along the wall on the right, the first room apparently about twice the size of the rest, if the position of the door is any indication, about 25 feet long.

They are ushered into that first room, which reveals itself to be a meeting room with a long table at the far wall, next to the two windows, and a sideboard and cabinet along the wall to their right; save for these and the chairs around the table, the room is bare. Having seen the late Varese's taste at his villa, Selina wonders if the Chinese have stripped the room of other, fancier furniture, perhaps a pair of leather armchairs and some ornate coffee table, to take elsewhere, thus reducing it to this minimalist arrangement. But her attention is soon occupied by studying their hosts who have risen from the table and, after advancing exactly one step each, are waiting for them to approach with the greetings.

There can be no doubt as to which of these is Wu, the boss; the stony-faced man not just behaves like he owns the place, but seems to look down on anyone less disagreeable than himself. Stocky and square-jawed, _harsh_ seems the best and shortest way to describe him, and his voice when he speaks has the same quality. A minute ago, when they were walking up the stairs, Bruce slipped the translation gadget that he had taken out of his jacket lining into her hand; having now switched it on, she does her best to feign incomprehension at his curt greeting until Bruce translates it officially for her and Gianfranco.

"Mr Wu would like to welcome you to the company," Bruce says, impassively, with just the tiniest hint of sarcasm. Wu's implication is clear; he is welcoming them, Gianfranco included, to _his_ company. "And he would like to thank you for suggesting a meeting. In view of the sad circumstances of Mr Varese's demise, it is important that we discuss a way forward that would be beneficial for all of us." Some of us more than others, Selina thinks, but if they can play this game their way, it will be Wu himself coming up the loser.

The introductions are performed in turn; Gianfranco, trying to play up Mafia overtones, calls Bruce his _consigliere_, advisor, rather than _consulente_, consultant, hoping that Wu will recognise the term in the original Italian before Bruce translates it; and he braves Bruce's sideways look when he puts an arm around Selina's waist introducing her as _Chiara, his fiancée_. Hopefully, if his late father ever mentioned his son's affairs to Wu, he wouldn't have gone beyond mentioning the girl's name, in which case they are safe. Wu, in his turn, introduces one of the other two men, the shorter and shifty-faced Zhang, as his deputy and finance director, and the other one, the bulky Xiao, as the health and safety manager, which is as ridiculous a euphemism for _enforcer_ as Selina has ever heard.

They trade inane remarks for the better part of half an hour; both parties state their intention to move the matter forward to a satisfactory conclusion, Gianfranco, plucking up some courage, suggests that all aspects of the proposed sale have to be considered, the apparent code for wanting to raise the buyout price, and Zhang, to whom Wu seems to leave the talking most of the time, responds that they are happy to do so but have to bear the company's difficult situation in mind, the apparent code for _no way_. By then it is almost half past four, and having completed this initial circling round, they agree to meet in this same room the following morning for a full-day meeting.

Once they have taken their leave from Wu and Xiao and are being escorted outside by Zhang, Selina grabs her chance when she sees the workshop gateway fractionally open. She jumps up to it and starts twittering about how fascinating it is and how she always wanted to see a weaving machine. Zhang tolerates it for just as long as is required for him not to look suspicious, which is a couple of seconds, before telling her in a decisive voice that the weaving machines are too noisy and closing the gates. No matter; she has seen most of what she needed to see.

xxx

As soon as they are out of direct line of sight from the Tessuti Varese gate, Bruce, who is ahead of them in the Scénic, pulls up at the side of the road. They stop and get out of Gianfranco's Alfa Romeo, wondering what it is that could not wait until they get to the villa. After all, they already agreed that they would not discuss business in the car in case the guards planted a bug to eavesdrop on them.

"I want my girlfriend back," he states simply in response to their quizzical expressions. Gianfranco's shoulders slump a bit, and Selina smiles.

"So what do you think?" he asks her when they have driven off again.

"About..?" she ventures, not sure what is safe to discuss. After all, he was the one worried about bugs.

"We're OK here, Theo has installed a bug sweeper in the radio, I've already run it."

"Ah. Well, it's like you said, all low tech but enough to be a hassle. There have to be a dozen guards, the three at the gate, one each I think for the warehouses, give or take, and I saw two in the weaving room and I figure there must be two more at the other end of the building. No one upstairs, unless you count Xiao. From what I saw, compared to the design Gianfranco showed us, they've split the production floor into smaller rooms. The first room has only four weaving machines in it when the design draft showed a dozen in total, and two of those were definitely idle, if not three. And this room now has a wall thirty feet in with a door and a sort of horizontal slit that the fabric is fed into. That's as much as I saw before Zhang closed the door." she concludes.

"You've seen enough for now, we'll get a video feed from the drone fly-by in an hour," he reassures her. "According to Gianfranco, there are also two workers who are not guards but actual technicians who know something about weaving, unlike the rest. So maybe one or both you saw in the weaving room was one of those. But I agree, a dozen guards, probably in two shifts, they don't look like they care about labour regulations and eight-hour days. Gianfranco told me when you were getting ready back at the villa that the explanation they gave him for the redesign," Bruce continues, "was that they've changed the product range to make waterproof fabrics for extreme wear conditions, more expensive but also taking longer to produce and needing chemical treatment. At least that's the official reason behind what must be in the next room, we'll see how true it is. There's something else I saw," he goes on with a scowl. "When we were walking back now and you were talking to Gianfranco, I saw a batch of flattened boxes taken to one of the new warehouses, so now we know for sure they're used for the yarn, and know what that warehouse is for."

"And the one next to it?"

"Now we get to the major evidence part. I didn't notice it with the drone, but the other one is connected to the box warehouse by a covered passage, and has a partially concealed smokestack next to it. Looks to me like an incineration facility."

Which makes absolutely zero sense.

"What kind of idiot would ship yarn in cardboard boxes, and then incinerate them instead of recycling?"

"The kind of idiot that built a chemical plant in a seismic region, next to an airfield that's supposedly abandoned," he reminds her grimly. The kind of idiot that may have more use for the packaging than the yarn and most likely has something hidden _inside_ that packaging, and doesn't want to leave traces."

There's no arguing with that. They trade identical scowls and drive the remaining two miles to the villa in an uneasy silence.

.

I am afraid I have no idea if a Renault Scénic can be fitted with a V12 engine as I describe, but I like the premise. It actually comes from a funny song I once heard, where what seems to be a tiny Cinquecento-like rundown car chasing criminals with unfailing success is suspected of being driven by Batman.

The components of a fingerprint dusting kit are pretty much as I list them.


	15. In Pandora's shoes

I am very, very grateful for the nice and encouraging reviews. With the full plot sitting in front of me I'd be ploughing ahead with this one anyway, but I confess I got twinges of insecurity over veering too far into geekdom to scare people away. It really helps to know that readers are still interested :)

This is the final tech-intensive bit, and you'll see the reason shortly; from now on the balance will be shifting somewhat toward, well, more pressing matters.

.

An hour later, they've seen it. They had to wait, or rather have the pair of drones waiting and hovering outside the weaving-machine room door for a few minutes until a guard came out to go outside for a smoke, but after that it was almost too easy. A quick look around the first room confirmed that only one out of four machines was running, with a second one on standby, and that the fabric was immediately fed through the low gap into the next room. There was just enough clearance to fly the drones through the gap, and Bruce had them perform some tricky manoeuvres to get them clear on the other end, but it worked.

Rewatching the captured video now, they are still trying to figure out the nature of the process in the room. It takes up the entire central part of the building between the weaving-machine room and a similar-sized room at the other end that, as they have now seen, holds finished rolls of fabric before they are transferred to the warehouse. This middle space is almost ninety feet long and the same twenty five feet wide as the weaving room before it, but this one has a sort of internal five-foot corridor, or rather a passage left free, along the right-hand side, with a sealed entrance halfway along the length of the room opening into the outside corridor, and a parallel two-foot elevated walkway, about seven feet off the ground, running along the left-hand side under the wide windows, mostly concealed by tall storage tanks, compressor equipment surrounded by coils of tubing, and huge ventilated air ducts in front of it. The central stretch of the long room is taken up by a linear sequence of four flat rectangular vats – or rather, two sequential sets of a vat and what Bruce says is some kind of dryer, if the ventilated ducts leading to and from these are any indication. At the far end of the room, the fabric, which seems to travel continuously through the vats and dryers up to that point, comes out again and goes through a low wide gap identical to the one at the weaving room end before it is rolled up in the last room. Scrutinising this assembly offers few clues apart from two things: this is a costly and complex operation and, according to Bruce, it is not entirely incompatible with the idea of a waterproofing treatment but it looks as if they are repeating the process twice, which makes no outward sense.

"I suppose it's time we switched insects on them," Bruce mutters, ignoring Gianfranco's uncomprehending look, and calls up a different application on the laptop.

But Gianfranco, as it turns, out, is not always easy to dismiss. "What is it you're doing now?"

"It's all a bit technical." Bruce manages to suppress the exasperated sigh... just. After all, Gianfranco is being helpful thus far. "We have a different kind of remote-controlled miniature drone. The fly drones you saw the camera feeds from are for video surveillance, but we also have surface-moving drones that can take samples of materials. We've seen what there is to see inside the production facility, but without knowing what sort of substances are involved, there's no way of knowing what's going on. So now I'll get in a dozen or so of the other kind to get us miniature samples of the yarn, the cardboard box lining, and the finished fabric, and I'll guide them outside the Tessuti Varese gates to a couple of hundred yards away where I can pick them up without the guards nabbing me. They look like ordinary cockroaches... well, just a bit bigger than ordinary but shouldn't look too suspicious from a few feet away. They also have a primitive camera to navigate, but mostly what these are, are a pair of pincers and micro vacuum pump for sampling and a storage chamber inside. So long as I have a couple of them going into each of the two yarn and fabric warehouses and three or four going after the boxes one after another, it won't look like enough of an infestation for the guards to start calling pest control."

Gianfranco seemingly gives up on the pretence of looking unimpressed and just mutters _Porco Giuda _instead of an answer.

"Are you gonna take them to our friend at Pisa airport?" Selina asks.

"Exactly," Bruce confirms. "He can then fly them to his HQ in the craft, and give us the analysis results before tomorrow morning. I'll give him a copy of the video feed too, I'd bet he can make better sense of it than we could. And if Blue-Eyed Wonder here gives you _any_ trouble while I'm away taking care of this," he adds in English in a completely deadpan tone, "all you need to do is say the word later."

Gianfranco's knowledge of English idioms is not good enough to figure out why Selina is suddenly snickering. And obviously, the Italian part of this latest exchange has gone completely over his head as well, but rather than start asking pointed questions about _what HQ_ and what sort of _craft_ Bruce is referring to, he goes for a sort of general guess.

"Who are you, really?" He eyes Bruce incredulously. "James Bond?"

Despite the tense situation, this makes Bruce laugh and makes Selina bite the insides of her cheeks trying not to. "You've got to be kidding me, I'm Ame-" Bruce cuts himself off at the slip but recovers almost instantly. "I mean Swiss." But Gianfranco has picked up on the accidental confession.

"Ah, then you must be Superman," he ventures.

Hopefully, Gianfranco will attribute the two of them collapsing against each other shaking with silent giggles to his attempt at a joke.

xxx

Lucius wakes them up with a phone call to Gianfranco's landline at about 3 am, which in itself is a sign that he has discovered something major. They put on dressing gowns and stumble, bleary-eyed, out of the bedroom to switch on the speakerphone in Giacomo's old study; Bruce raps on Gianfranco's bedroom door as they pass it, and he joins them a minute later.

"I've finished the tests," Lucius tells them grimly. "It actually looks like a very similar process to what I was describing to you talking about the Kevlar treatment, except that the purpose here is not to alter the properties of the fabric but to transport a substance soaked into it."

The three of them exchange tense looks. "Drugs?" Bruce offers.

"Worse," Lucius replies, sounding crestfallen. "I'll spare you the chemical designations but I'll explain the principle. I've identified the composition of the yarn; it isn't polyester but a highly absorbent polymer. In the spools they get, the yarn polymer has been treated by a base compound that doesn't react with the polymer chain but bonds to the molecular strands on the surface in a stable way that allows to transport it over a long distance. Now the box lining, which in a normal cardboard box consists just of corrugated pulp sheets, is in this case filled with a loose powder that is a constituent of several highly toxic substances. It is not detectable between the layers of cardboard and doesn't leak so long as the boxes don't get wet or torn, which you say they don't because they are shipped inside containers, and it can then be easily retrieved by destroying the box and collecting the powder. So long as the powder is in crystalline state, it cannot yet act as a toxin, but once it's been dissolved in a non-polar solvent, it reacts with the base compound bonded to the polymer yarn to create a powerful nerve agent. The yarn isn't affected by non-polar solvents, so the fabric structure remains intact, but due to its high absorbency the yarn expands like a sponge and can carry an amount of final toxin that is almost five times its weight. I know you couldn't get a sample of the solvent itself, but I'm thinking it must be carbon disulfide. It is non-polar and wouldn't look suspicious as a textile plant's feedstock as it is widely used in rayon production. It's also extremely flammable and with a very low auto-ignition temperature, with a boiling point of only 46°, which explains all those coolant pipes and compressors you saw in the treatment room. Once the reaction is complete, they then need to remove the solvent, which is what the first dryer unit with the ventilation ducts must be for. Due to the low boiling point, they only need to heat the fabric to about fifty degrees to make it evaporate. My guess is that the solvent vapours are then distilled and recycled, or else they'd be needing too much of it and there's no easy way to dispose of it. To make sure that the toxin-saturated fabric doesn't disperse its contents, they then coat the fabric in PVC, which must be the second reaction vat, and heat-seal it, which must be the second dryer. They probably have a way of making sure they keep the edges of the fabric sealed off in the treatment vats, grabbed between guide rails most likely, so they look like untreated fabric. And then to cover their tracks, they put about a quarter of an inch of untreated fabric on top of each roll of the PVC-coated stuff, that's what the other machine on standby must be for, so from the outside the rolls look entirely untreated. The fabric in the rolls has fewer layers, but is heavier due to the chemical it carries, so the weight balances out and doesn't look suspicious. Then when it arrives wherever it's bound for," Lucius concludes, "both the PVC and the polymer yarn are dissolved in a _polar_ solvent that, in turn, does not affect the toxin, and the toxin is collected either by evaporating and distilling it or by centrifugal extraction."

"So what you're saying," Bruce replies, visibly shaken, "is basically that we're looking at a chemical weapons factory converting DIY nerve toxin kits into finished weapons-grade shit in portable form that looks 100% civilian."

"Basically," Lucius agrees.

"_Cazzo._" This, of course, is Gianfranco sitting next to her, scared to a deathly pallor_._

"You said it," is Bruce's verdict. "OK, I'd better get Theo on the case to see what he can do about Interpol notices. Thank you, Lucius." Bruce sounds as gloomy as Lucius by now. "Will I see you back here later?"

"Of course," Lucius assures him. "Just give me a couple of hours."

The call Bruce makes next is to Lugano, where Theo sounds surprisingly awake. Or not surprisingly, she figures as she hears the man running through his pastimes of the moment.

"We've been looking at the ship movements as we agreed, Brandon," Theo starts right after quick greetings to Selina and Gianfranco, "and I've checked the containers you tagged last week when you tracked them to Tessuti Varese. These same containers went back to Livorno yesterday and are now being loaded back onto the COSCO Ningbo bound for its next port of call, with a cargo announced as tent fabric. And its next port of call is Jeddah in Saudi Arabia before it goes back to China." Right; waterproof, PVC-coated tent fabric going to a desert country. "I've checked the routes of the four other Greek-flag ships, they're the same. Livorno, Jeddah, a couple of other places, then Guangzhou. And every time, every two weeks, it looks like they're bringing in small ten-container shipments of yarn and taking out ten-container shipments of fabric. I'm now trying to get into the Jeddah port records to see where these go next, it's a fucking hassle without speaking Arabic. My suspicion is that it doesn't stop there."

"I'm sure it doesn't," Bruce tells him. "I'll tell you what _we_ found, between that and what you're saying it looks like we're dealing with a budding alliance between the Triad and international terrorists."

When Bruce has finished the summary of their recent discovery, Theo's first reaction, perhaps predictably, is to tell them all to _get the fuck out of there_.

"What, and have the Chinese do a runner?" Bruce counters immediately. "The second they sniff something's wrong they'll disappear, maybe even destroy the site to avoid capture and make poison elsewhere. The only way to catch them is to pretend we know nothing."

"Can you stop looking for reasons to make yourselves into human targets?" Theo lashes back at him, obviously cross. "There'll be a way to track them. With what you're saying it looks like a fine collection of charges already, terrorism, organised crime, weapons smuggling, likely money laundering. I can kick every ass I still know in Lyon to get them to issue a red notice for Wu's arrest in 24 hours. Better still, an _orange_ notice, the terrorism threat warning, in 36. It'll take longer to convince them to issue it for what looks like a small far-fetched case, but it's a much bigger charge and once it's issued, the Carabinieri will be sure to send in the ROS, their Special Ops unit, right away."

"By which time Wu will be anywhere in the world, and the factory may be either in pieces or making oilskin tablecloths." Bruce isn't budging an inch. "We'll sit tight and pretend to negotiate while you're working on the notice. As soon as we know they're sending someone in, we're out."

"Do you think you're Superman?" Theo scolds him next, oddly echoing Gianfranco's inept guessing a few hours earlier. "Do you think that the Kevlar makes you invincible and they won't find a way to kill you?" Selina mentally shakes hands with him; he is saying the things she would have wanted to say; the only difference is that she has given up in favour of the _if you can't beat them, join them_ route.

"Let's make a deal," Bruce says, trying to be conciliatory. "As soon as we gather enough info to make sure they can be found and charged and the operation can be stopped here _and_ in China, we get out. So it'll be the sooner of the two, the orange notice and Special Ops or killer evidence. Trust me, I have no wish to deal with these fuckers any longer than necessary and even less of a wish to have Selina and Gianfranco in there, except that he is needed as a pretext for the meeting and she refuses to stay away, but I want to get them. Who knows how many people they may be killing with that shit they're making here, and who knows how many more they'll kill if they aren't stopped."

When Bruce starts spouting global-scale morality he becomes notoriously difficult to argue with, as Theo is now discovering.

"Right," he says, resigned. "I'll let you know as soon as something happens on this end. I'll also keep looking at the Jeddah port info, and see if there are any payments to Huaya or its Indonesian fronts originating in the Middle East. Maybe we can get them faster by following the money."

"Thanks. You should be getting some sleep," Bruce tells him. "We won't be going anywhere in the next five hours anyway, and you probably won't be able to do anything about the notice until then, either." Official Interpol channels are round-the-clock, but to Theo's occasional frustration, his present-day channels are mostly _un_official and as such, depend on the schedule of the particular person he is dealing with.

"As if I needed the reminder," Theo replies sourly. "I'll poke around for another hour or so, if I find anything of value I'll send it on. You should get some rest too, I'm not the one walking into a chemical weapons factory come morning."

By the time they are awake at eight, Theo has sent Bruce a brief encrypted message that, once opened, shows the results of his research for what must have been the rest of the night, and proves that even if unofficial, at least his contacts at the Interpol Financial Crime Unit are a force to be reckoned with. By cross-checking the sequential sources of money inflows into the Chinese ultimate parent company and its Indonesian subsidiaries with the destinations of money outflows from suspected terrorist finance fronts, he has seen intersection points between the two streams; it looks like the shipments are routed through and paid for by a chain of fronts whose final beneficiaries include the Syrian government, the Yemeni terrorist insurgents like Al-Aqsa and Abdallah Hazim, and a couple of other, equally unsavoury groups.

"They likely lack the technology to make the shit themselves," Bruce explains to her; they have decided to keep this latest nugget from Gianfranco as it does not affect his safety or current status and will only scare him more. "So the Chinese mafia is making millions selling it to them. Syria is under partial trade embargo for weapons and dual-use goods and chemicals, Yemen is nominally clean, and Saudi Arabia is China's long-standing trading partner, but if they tried to ship to any of these countries directly, even to the Saudis, their fear would be the CIA eventually getting wind of this and camping out in Guangzhou to sniff at every container until they were satisfied that these were legitimate goods, and they couldn't risk that sort of scrutiny. Besides, it's quite likely that this stuff could become unstable on a long voyage. This way they are routing it through a European country that arouses no suspicion and cutting the travel time for the finished toxin from a month to four days."

No wonder they killed poor Giacomo as soon as he got curious, she thinks. With this kind of secret to guard, they'll do the same to anyone short of a tank battalion, and pity those who take it upon themselves to play Pandora to this particular box.

.

As Lucius says, there is a lot of resemblance between the Kevlar treatment I have him explain Ch 13 and the process I describe here, and this actually deserves a comment to explain the sequence of how it came about. Implausible as it may sound, I constructed the process I describe here _first_, trying to observe the general principles of chemistry and physics and figuring how a toxin can be transported completely hidden inside fabric fibers, and was about to write a note apologising for the chemistry here being utter bullshit (as you see, I still totally fudged it on the actual substances). And then when looking for extra-strength Kevlar for Ch 13, I found the research paper on the silica treatment and was shocked to see that the process, or at least the principle that I describe, is absolutely real, down to the details, except that the agent involved is innocuous silica instead of a toxin and the impregnation is an end in itself, not a means of making it portable. But I figured that the unintentional parallel was actually more of a blessing than a curse, not to mention an unexpected plausibility boost, hence I kept the process here as is.

Interpol red and orange notices, respectively, are basically as I label them, a de facto International arrest warrant and a warning of terrorist activity that represents an imminent threat and danger to persons or property. I don't really know how long it would take to get each of these issued, though it would definitely depend on the info and the source; but considering that they issued nearly 8,000 red notices and only 31 orange notices in 2011, I'd say that an orange one is harder to get. Lyon is the Interpol HQ.

The Carabinieri ROS (_Raggruppamento Operativo Speciale_ ) is, indeed, the elite Special Operational Group that deals with specific high threats.

The properties of carbon disulfide are pretty much as I describe.


	16. Discovering keys

My chapter breaks just got fucked. This one has covered half of what I thought it would at 4K as is, which means that its former second half is going to be a separate chapter, as the content and endpoints of the former ##17 and 18, which are now going to be ##18 and 19, must remain inviolable... oh well. Twenty three chapters it is, then ;)

The name of this chapter, should you see it and wonder about the plural later, comes from the Italian for USB stick, _chiavetta_, literally _little key_.

.

Later that day, once they have repeated the guard post metal detector routine and the negotiations are open in earnest, they do their best to set aside the terrifying knowledge they are now privy to, and play as tough as their precarious position permits – and above all, they do their best to stall. Bruce takes his time doing precise and detailed translations for Gianfranco, insisting that the Chinese wait until he is finished and before doing the same in the opposite direction with Gianfranco's meandering remarks. Selina plays stupid as best she can, asks for clarifications on every point so Gianfranco and Bruce have to stop and then interrupt and correct each other explaining to her what is being said... when she either knows it perfectly already or does not really need to know, and pops out of the room every now and then for pretend phone calls, the incoming quota of which Bruce surreptitiously triggers, only to come back a few minutes later to ask for an account of what went on in her absence. Between themselves, Bruce and Gianfranco bicker over valuation techniques and residual book value, apparently trying to use financial analysis to bargain up the price, while Zhang and Wu flatly and curtly point them to the company's official losses for the past year and a half, as a thinly veiled euphemism for _don't hope for another cent above our offered price when no profits can be proven_. They talk about _survival of contingent liabilities_ and throw in the need for Wu to also buy out Varese's minority stake in the empty-box trader Qingdao Jinglian, which he is, perhaps not surprisingly, much less interested in buying, before going on to discuss tax implications and possible ownership transfer mechanisms and money transfer routes ostensibly to help them avoid paying the transaction tax, and Bruce again does his best to be cautious and nitpicky and unhelpful at every turn. Forget _accountant_; he'd make a good nasty _lawyer_.

She sits on the other side of Gianfranco from Bruce, which would be pretty much unacceptable in most situations, and she is sure Bruce would share the sentiment, but on the upside on this occasion, it makes it much easier for her to pull Gianfranco's notepad a couple of inches closer and scribble two words on it, _pranzo fuori_, when the others are engrossed in the discussion. Gianfranco sees them and gives a fractional nod; he is the one nominally calling the shots among the three of them, the operative word being _nominally_, but still; and so it falls to him to announce, at a quarter to one, that they need an hour's break to have a quick lunch outside. They agree to resume at two, and the three of them are escorted outside to the Scénic; they gave up the pretence of two cars for the time being. But instead of finding a lunch spot in Prato as Gianfranco implied, they head straight to his family villa.

xxx

"There's something I heard them say," she starts when Bruce has run the bug-sweep check and told her and Gianfranco that they can talk in the car, "that may give us the _killer evidence_ we need to get them."

The announcement is met with an interested look from Gianfranco in the back seat and from stony silence from Bruce next to her. When he relents, it is in a flat, tense voice. "I can tell there is a _but_ to this."

"But you're not gonna like it," she admits.

"I can tell that much already," he parries, not looking at her. "Go on."

She takes a deep breath and gets on with it; they don't have time to argue, and he has just _de facto_ acknowledged it. "You've seen the way the upper floor rooms are arranged. After the meeting room there's Zhang's room, then the deputy general manager's which is now Xiao's, then the receptionist's room, then Wu's, which, I suppose, was Giacomo's, that's connected to the reception by a door, then the archive at the far end. When Wu got a phone call half an hour ago and you made a fake call to my number so I could follow him, he was so caught up in his call that he didn't go all the way into his office, just stayed in the receptionist's room, so I went and stayed outside the door, he didn't know I was there, and the guard from downstairs must have thought Wu had gone into the office, so when he saw me outside the reception pretending to be talking in Italian he wasn't alarmed and went back downstairs. But I heard what Wu was saying."

"Did the translator pick up what he said from behind the door?" Bruce asks, doubtful.

"It didn't need to. He talked in English to someone who must have been a new buyer, the way he was sweet-talking them and making promises. Something called PKK..."

"_Fuck_." Bruce does not look so much shocked as disgusted, the way he rolls his eyes.

"Who are they?"

"The Kurdistan Workers' Party. Terrorists. Mostly they kill people in Turkey, but they're also active in Iraq and all over the region."

"Figures. Well, he was promising that other asshole he was talking to that he'd get back to him later today with price quotes and proposed logistics arrangements, he said he'd need to look at production logs to see how much and how quickly they could ramp up production, and if they'd need to set up an additional facility. When he was done with the call I walked away from the door just in case he got out, I made it look like I was putting on makeup at the window, he doesn't know I speak English anyway, but then he called in Xiao and they talked in Chinese, just loudly enough so I was getting a translation. He wanted to ask Zhang to play for time with us over the Qingdao sale proposal, he wanted to handle that discussion himself but needed time to work on the info for this PKK thing, and Xiao suggested that he _get out the stick_ and run the numbers on it using his laptop while in the meeting room with us. And Wu shot it down at once saying there was no point keeping the stick locked in a safe if he then dangled it in front of us. Xiao wasn't sure that we represented that much of a risk–"

"Good boy."

"But Wu said better safe than sorry, and ended it at that. I don't know if they said anything else after that, I figured I'd better get back in with you and Zhang before they saw me, but it sounds like we have to steal that _chiavetta_."

They are almost at the villa by then, and listening to the engine rumble, she wonders if Bruce is going to say another word until they are inside... or afterwards, for that matter.

He speaks just as they are pulling up into the villa driveway. "You mean _you_ have to steal the _chiavetta_."

She does not want to rub it in, but she _is_ the best qualified person to do it. "You said it yourself, it's the killer evidence that can give us everything, with or without the orange notice. It could have enough info to catch them all, in Italy _and_ in China. And it's bound to have Wu's fingerprints on it for the Interpol database check."

They get out of the car and into the villa in gloomy silence. Gianfranco, wisely, does not interfere. Looking at the pained expression on Bruce's face, she is sorry to be putting him through this, but hell, he _did_ start this whole Varese thing with his uneasy conscience.

"Fine," he finally says, in a tone of someone accepting his death sentence, when they are in Giacomo's study. "I suppose I could try to see if I could get my hands on his laptop instead to get traces of data from the stick or get a keyboard log program running, but if he's as paranoid about it as he seems, he'll make sure it's next to impossible to do either. But if you're going to steal it, we go through it _now_, step by step, to see how it can be done and how we make certain you avoid capture."

She isn't going to argue with that.

Gianfranco takes Bruce's unwilling acquiescence and her silence as his cue. "There's something that can help us." Seeing their expectant looks, he continues: "They don't know it, but I have a key to my father's office. Not to the door that opens into the reception, the secretary had it and they took it away when they fired her, but to the other door that opens directly into the corridor. I haven't seen Wu use it, and if I understand you right, Céline, you haven't either." He sees her nod and finishes: "So it looks like Wu is treating it as locked. My father was the only one who had that key, and they must have figured that even if it was still out here somewhere, none of us from the family would be able to, or want to, go in there on our own to use it. Unless he has put up a bookcase or something in front of it, it may still open with the old key."

Mercifully, it makes Bruce look less miserable. "Do you know what sort of security there was inside? Not that Wu couldn't have changed it– "

"Same as outside, infrared sensors. If I remember right, there were two of them, in the two corners next to the wall where the window is."

"Makes sense. They can be triggered by direct sunlight and car headlights, so they usually face away from windows. Did your father have a safe in there?"

"Yes, but it was an old one that opened with a key– "

"OK, so we can take it for granted that whether or not he added more sensors or a camera, he would have changed the safe."

"That's fine, I've brought the drilling kit and the bore scope," Selina joins in, "so I can open it quickly regardless of type."

"Unless the noise alerts the guards, or unless he has some sort of special alarm rigged after hours," Bruce reminds her grimly. "Worst thing is, we can't recon for it using a drone because it's practically certain that the safe will be inside a closed cupboard of some kind–"

"That's where the old one was, so I'm sure you're right," Gianfranco observes.

"Figures. So it will only be exposed a couple of times a day when Wu takes the stick out and puts it back in. We don't have enough time to wait for that, and can't manipulate the drone when we are over there without my laptop; and I'm not taking it there with the stuff that's on it; plus having the drone fly close to Wu would be risky anyway. So yes, I suppose you'll need to bring along all the safecracking kit you've got here, and maybe it's a good idea to take Wu's prints this afternoon just in case, if you manage it–"

"Consider it done."

"Just make sure you don't risk your life getting them. My bet is that being the greedy bastard he is, it's more likely that he'll either have something with just a thumbprint scan, or better still, a keypad where the index finger should be enough, rather than something super fancy that needs a full set. Apart from the safe, we have two problems."

"Disabling the IR sensors," Selina jumps in again.

"And the question of how you get in there in the first place, after hours and with all the equipment, and how you get back out. And then there's the attendant problem of possible extra security in the room, but that's tied in to the sensors and there may be a way to deal with it. Now for the sensors, the best thing to do would be to put a plate of glass or plastic in front of them that blocks the infrared– "

"Are you trying to teach me the tricks of my trade?"

"No, just thinking out loud. That would be impractical anyway. So the next best thing, I figure, would be to get a modified version of our camera drone fitted with a cooling foam spray can – the stuff goes solid in seconds and is commercially available in pressurised cans, it's just a matter of making a miniature one just big enough to hold the amount of foam needed to cover a sensor window, no more than four square inches. The drone doesn't generate heat, or rather whatever tiny amount it does generate is balanced out by its propeller cooling the air around it, and moving objects of identical temperature don't trigger the alarm. I saw three sensors in the upper floor corridor, two at either end and a wide-angle in the middle, so we need at least five drones if we use one per sensor, plus a couple of spares if anything goes wrong, say three spares, eight in total. They're going to be bigger than standard, so you'll have to pick them up when you get there to make sure no one sees them later."

"How are you going to get them modified between now and tonight?" She assumes that tonight is the soonest she can get in.

"I'm not," Bruce corrects her. "Lucius is. He'll have come back to Galileo by now, I'll call him and ask him to fly a bunch of these back to Go–" she can practically see the _oh fuck_ written on his face before he changes it, mid-word, to _goddamn HQ_, "if he hasn't done so already, remember that sample box I gave him, then get them modified there as crudely and quickly as he can, and fly them back here in time for me to disable the sensors this evening while there's still enough ambient light to manoeuvre the drones, and before Wu leaves for the day so we can get to the sensors inside the room. That way we'll also see if he has any new security in there. The sensor windows are white, or light grey, so the foam won't really show up against them once it's dried. There shouldn't be anyone up there at night when the alarm would be on so a lack of signal is natural, and during the day the alarm is off so it won't look suspicious that nothing's being triggered. Could work. Let me call Lucius and see what I can do. In the meantime," Bruce continues, turning to Gianfranco, "can you see if you can find anyone with a helicopter pilot's licence that they can lend us for a few hours and for a few thousand euro, no questions asked? Preferably male and in his thirties or forties, I'd look pretty strange with a woman's ID, even with my photo stuck on."

"How are you going to get the helicopter itself?" Selina asks. She has to agree that his apparent plan is the only viable option.

"Write a corporate check for half a million euro," Bruce says, ignoring Gianfranco's round eyes, "and leave it with them as security."

Whatever reservations Gianfranco may have regarding Bruce's flying skills, he does not seem inclined to raise the issue. Then again, he knows about the Cessna. "What sort of helicopter are you thinking about?" he asks, once he has recovered from hearing the amount of Tessuti Varese's onetime annual profits thrown around in such a blasé manner.

"Light. Small. Two- or four-seater. With a towing rig."

"I think I can do better than the licence, then," Gianfranco responds. "But there may be a condition attached."

"OK, tell us more."

"There's a friend of my father's who lives in Pistoia, about ten miles west of here. He owns a four-seater helicopter, I think a Robinson– "

"Raven I or Raven II?"

"What's the difference?" Selina asks.

"The amount of the check I'll need to write. One's about three hundred thousand euro, the other one's about four, though it depends on the extras."

"I'm not sure," Gianfranco comments, "but he won't be interested in a deposit, I know him. What he'll insist on is flying with us. He may be persuaded to let you fly it if I tell him we're doing it to get the people who killed my father, but he'll never agree to get it out of his sight."

"Fair enough," Bruce concedes. "Are you sure he can be trusted?"

"My father and he were best friends at school. I'm sure."

"Good. You call him then and I'll call Lucius about the drones. Tell him I used to fly a military prototype helicopter as a... test pilot."

She has to admire Bruce's ability to tell the truth in the most confusing ways.

xxx

It seems to be working. Lucius has concluded that adding a mini-spray can to the drones is feasible, despite the greater drain the added weight puts on power, considering that they'll have relatively short distances to fly; Giacomo's friend has agreed to let them come to his house late that evening and let Bruce show him _if he can fly_, which means it's as good as settled already; Gianfranco has produced the key, which Bruce has hidden in the same concealed pocket in the back of his jacket lining where he smuggles Selina's translator gadget, and they are wrapping up the discussion before heading back out, sitting around with beer bottles and sandwiches in place of the more leisurely lunch they pretend to be taking.

"The remaining big issue," Bruce states, "is putting the stick back in. It's too risky to let Céline take a computer in there to transfer the files – no offence, but if the stick is password protected or otherwise booby-trapped, it'll take a bigger hacker than you are, and a more powerful computer than my laptop, to circumvent it. I wouldn't try it myself, I'll just take it to Lucius and have him do it. Which means that we'll be taking the stick out and need to put it back in before Wu looks for it so they don't figure out we're on to them and start blowing shit up. It would be too suspicious to do another flyover; two in the same night is bad enough, but at least it can look like a roundtrip from Pistoia to Florence, but two _more_ times will be obvious. So we must figure out a way to do it in the morning. We could get in early, say 8 am, and ask to wait for them in the meeting room, but there's bound to be a guard watching us before the bosses arrive."

"I could do what I did earlier today, pretend I got a phone call, go out and sneak into Wu's office with Gianfranco's key..."

"Too risky. As you yourself said, there's usually a guard at the bottom of the stairs now that we're in the building, it looks like they reassigned one from one of the yarn warehouses, and if he sees that you aren't headed to the downstairs restrooms and doesn't hear you on the phone, he'll walk up to check. _And_ if he sees that you aren't in the corridor, he only needs two seconds to look into the meeting room and see you aren't there either."

"I can do it." Gianfranco's resolute statement takes them by surprise. So long as Bruce was the official superspy of the bunch, he could apparently live with being the relatively inept one, but now with Selina about to jump out of a helicopter to crack a safe, it must be too embarrassing for him to feel useless.

"You'll have the same problem as Céline."

"So long as we no longer care that they know I've got the key, I'll have _less_ of a problem. I can pretend that I wanted to use the en-suite bathroom in my father's office instead of the restrooms, and if I put the office key on my usual key ring I'll just say I always had it there and never cared, they've seen the key ring twice already at the gate and won't be looking too closely, it's unmarked anyway. And assuming Céline finds out how to open the safe tonight, I'll use the same combination or fingerprint or whatever to open it tomorrow, put the stick in, and close it again quickly enough before I flush the toilet and open the door for the guard if he comes wondering."

"It's still risky. What if they get in and catch you when you're at the safe cabinet?"

"That can only happen if Wu gets in early. But in that case I can say that my father kept a ledger in there, which he did, on top of the safe, that I was trying to sneak out now to help us bargain with them on the figures. In the worst case, it'll make them break off negotiations, but if you get the info off the stick and they don't find out, it won't matter that we're out of there."

She can see the indecision in Bruce's face; it is a matter of choosing the marginally lesser evil out of two pretty bad ones.

"OK," he gives in at last. "If you do it quickly, it shouldn't take more than a couple of minutes. As you say, they'll probably boot us out, but hopefully it won't matter. What this leaves is the matter of testing the key this afternoon when we're back there."

"Well, for _that_ I could surely pretend to get a call while Wu is with you discussing Qingdao–" she ventures.

"And what if the guard sees you fiddling with the door?"

"Shouldn't take long–"

"I have an idea," Gianfranco, inspired by his new career prospects as a secret agent, sits up and snaps his fingers for emphasis. "Céline – I mean, _Chiara_ and I can sneak out of the meeting room separately and meet in the corridor just outside Wu's office for a bit of _carezze_– "

He never finishes this. What he sees of Bruce's expression in his peripheral vision is enough to stop him mid-sentence, with his mouth still open. Selina is not sure whether to laugh or to cry; at least she trusts Bruce to be the smarter one and not ruin the whole mission by reducing one of the principal performers to a pulp.

But when she ventures a sideways glance in his direction, it becomes clear that Bruce has chosen a less spectacular, but no less effective, mode of punishment.

He sits and stares. It isn't a particularly intense stare, either, but the way it shifts between Gianfranco's face and his crotch is a blatant reminder of what he said back on the boat about the survival of the other man's balls, and it works like a charm: Gianfranco looks to be a split second away from jumping up and running off.

"Really?" Bruce says casually after a few endless seconds.

"No!" Gianfranco all but shouts. "I mean, I was... I was just... saying it... as an example... I mean... why don't you two get out there... and pretend to... cheat on me?" He sounds out of breath by the end of it.

Selina is sorry for him; but not enough to let him completely off the hook.

"_Pretend?_" She raises her eyebrows as she gets up and walks past him, following Bruce out of the villa and to the car. "We're gonna cheat all right, believe you me."

.

Before smut-starved readers approach me with pitchforks, I do intend to make a more direct reference to the _cheating_, just wasn't feeling up to it now.

And if you've read it thus far, it won't have escaped your attention that I am a major nerd, so you'll probably suspect already that what I mention about the properties of infrared sensors, cooling foam, Robinson helicopters, and the PKK is based on more or less official stuff I read on the respective subjects ;)


	17. Unlocking doors

What you get today is two chapters, as I was trying to type these up sooner to get to the next one following them. As it is, it is 6 am and I am too dead tired, so that one will have to wait until tomorrow.

In an unusual twist, I can't see anything in these two that needs technical notes; the only bit that might do with an explanation is five lines down in this chapter, so I'll just deal with it here. _Cornuto_ is Italian for cuckold ;)

.

They manage to test the key that afternoon, though testing the key is not the part she will keep recalling later.

Two hours into the afternoon session, when they are hunched over ownership charts and an array of spreadsheets and Gianfranco is putting his Milanese MBA to good use by checking effective stake values and all-in ownership transfer costs on a fancy financial calculator, Bruce gives the Chinese a brief apology under the pretext of a bathroom break and walks out, but not before she has heard him mutter something in Gianfranco's ear that to her, sounds distinctly like _ciao,_ _cornuto_. A few seconds later, she gets an incoming call and offers her pretend fiancé a much more civilised _scusami, tesoro_ before slipping out just as she says _Pronto_ to her pretend caller.

When she has closed the door behind her and put the phone back into her handbag, she walks to her right where Bruce is waiting outside Giacomo's old office; the moment she is within two paces of him, he takes her by the shoulders and flips her around so that her back is pressed against the office door. She is not sure how much is a calculated move to let them get on with the mission and how much is the desperation to just get it on, and suspects that it is more the latter.

"Missed me?" he teases her in a rasp of a whisper, when her hands slip under his jacket.

"You have no idea," she breathes back, inwardly cursing both the Kevlar lining in the suits that restricts their roaming hands to above the waist and especially the fact that she is wearing trousers; if she had a skirt on, it would be up at her waist now and she'd be straddling him with her back against the door, and she is sure that for this once he wouldn't mind the public setting. As it is, all they can do is frantically unbutton each other's shirts – she is grateful that he is not wearing a tie – and all but claw at each other's skin while devouring each other's tongues in a wild kiss; but this is clearly not enough and, throwing caution to the winds and apparently with his wholehearted approval, she unzips his trousers and slips her hand inside to stroke him; when he does the same to her, she has to bite his neck to stop herself from moaning, and it only turns him on more. She has seen the guard watching them from the stairs, pretending not to, but when she stares at him directly over Bruce's shoulder he retreats a few steps. It is ironic how hiding in plain sight is their best chance to both accomplish their covert task and finally get their fill of each other after a few stressful days. Not that she can ever really get her fill of him when to her, he is a controlled substance, the most powerful drug she ever tried.

It is all spliced together, desperation and hunger and need and lust, they really can't get enough, like starved teenagers; she cranes her neck up to kiss him again, her vision blurred and her breath ragged, before they are seconds apart in a frantic climax, Selina unable to stop herself from crying out. It is only when they are slumped against each other on shaky legs when she remembers the key almost as an afterthought and, sneaking it out of her jacket pocket, slips it into the lock behind her back, turns it twice until it won't go further, presses the handle and cautiously nudges the door; it opens and she can see a narrow strip of daylight across his cheek; there is nothing behind it. Carefully she pulls the door closed and locks it again; they still cannot let go of each other, their lips still locked in a succession of light kisses, until for once it is her turn to say that they need to go back.

When he has left to clean himself up downstairs, she picks up her handbag lying discarded on the floor, staggers over to the window across the corridor, and opens it – thankfully, a natural thing to do in her current state – and is happy to see that it is not alarmed. She takes a few deep breaths before closing it again, but not before she has fished out a mirror from the makeup kit in her handbag to check her face, pulling out a slip of plastic fingerprint tape strip from her business card case at the same time, and surreptitiously lodged it between the lock latch bolt and the other half of the casement window while closing it, flush with the window frame on the inside and with a one-inch tail of clear plastic on the outside that will let her open the window from the other side later. She has to follow Bruce downstairs to restore a minimum of decency to her appearance; they pass each other on the stairs with dirty looks and so end up back in the meeting room in a space of two minutes from each other, she ostensibly pocketing the phone but their flushed and still somewhat dishevelled appearance leaving little doubt as to their recent activities, or at least to the greater part of those. Even the stoical Chinese flash Gianfranco looks of commiseration; he presses his lips together and carries on with the financial haggling, by now once again with Bruce as his somewhat distracted go-between.

xxx

So far it has worked surprisingly smoothly, she thinks, sitting in the back seat of the helicopter, next to a mildly nervous Gianfranco. After a day of very relative progress with their key-test outing as its highlight, they wrapped up the discussion shortly before six saying that they would "recheck their calculations" and come back to Wu and Zhang the next morning with a modified proposal for the simultaneous sale of the Tessuti Varese and Qingdao Jinglian stakes. The way Gianfranco was cunningly hinting at it and Bruce was translating it, they seem to be willing to come back with a lower price quote, if only as a hook to keep Wu interested in the game for another day. Wu sat there stone-faced for a few seconds before issuing a fractional nod, which was Zhang's cue to verbally state their agreement. An hour earlier, when they were granted the rare favour of a coffee break and one of he guards brought them a tray of plastic cups, she managed to swap the empty cup Wu had drunk his espresso from for her own and, pretending to still be sipping the last drops while holding it delicately at the rim, stepped outside just long enough to lift his fingerprints using the faux makeup kit in her bag.

Instead of going back to Prato after leaving Castelletto, they drove straight to Pisa for Bruce to pick up the modified drones from Lucius who had just landed, and after a quick test run spraying an infrared sensor at Gianfranco's villa – she had to grant it to Lucius, the man was a genius – Bruce took his laptop and drove a second Varese family car to Castelletto to deploy the drones, and came back less than an hour later, just as it was getting dark, to say that everything was in place.

They ate dinner and waited around for another half hour before going to Pistoia to meet with Lorenzo Martignano, the late Varese's friend, at eleven as previously agreed. Selina had a momentary worry seeing his sceptical face, but three minutes into the test flight on his beloved R44 Raven he was sufficiently convinced of Bruce's skill as to say _va bene, faccialo_. After that he watched silently as Bruce, Gianfranco and Selina practiced the approach to a flat paved area of similar size to the Tessuti Varese rooftop and her landing on it and even offered to stay in the back seat for the real thing. It was an offer Selina would have gratefully accepted had she not needed Gianfranco's help with the door and the towing rope when she had to step onto the landing skid for her descent to the rooftop and with the bigger harness when she had to get back in. He looked like a decent guy, if a touch too serious, and was impeccably polite to her and did his best not to stare at her black Kevlar cat burglar outfit, in contrast to both Gianfranco who had trouble keeping his eyes from popping out when he first saw her in it and Bruce who was too unnerved seeing her in it to even notice Gianfranco's ogling. Good, she thought, I'm not the only one who is shaken by signature clothing.

They are now bound southeast from Pistoia in the direction of Florence, and that is nominally Bruce's destination in case they are queried – helicopters seldom are but you never know, and it helps to have a cover story – luckily, Prato is almost exactly halfway between the two cities, a mere ten miles from Pistoia. Contrary to safety rules, Bruce has dimmed the headlights, but on the upside, he should be able to avoid any airborne objects or tall terrestrial obstacles thanks to wearing a pair of night vision goggles that he wisely packed in Lugano. Selina, of course, is wearing the same, and seeing the world in garish green hues once again reminds her incongruously of the last time she wore them for their early bedroom antics the night of the dinner date, and thus also of the events of the afternoon; she is glad that Gianfranco cannot see her blushing in the dim cabin.

Five minutes later, she can see the dim dark green outline of Castelletto below and ahead of them in her passenger window; she rechecks the carbine of the tow rope attached to her belt, exchanges nods with Gianfranco and holds up her hand in a salute to the men in front, getting a similar salute in return, opens the door, and steps out into the breezy darkness, sliding onto the landing skid as Bruce banks slightly to let the angle lend her extra stabiliity. When he straightens out the craft she is holding firmly on to one of the struts supporting the skid, and Gianfranco has moved into her seat so he is next to her. When they are about two hundred yards from the site, Bruce brings the helicopter down as low as could be considered less than absolutely suspicious, which they figured earlier would be about 60 feet, and she dives down, the rig mechanism luckily cushioning the moment when her eight-foot rope slack runs out, after which she gives thumbs-up to Gianfranco who in turn signals to Bruce and he slowly lets out the rope until she is far below them, at the same time slowing down until they are directly over the roof. She sees it as a dark rectangular outline of a hundred by thirty feet right under her, set off by the green glow around it from lights further below, and once her feet touch the roof she pulls the quick release for the carbine and rolls just as Bruce told her, seeing, as soon as she has straightened out, the helicopter soar upwards and continue its imaginary trip to Florence.

She waits for a minute to see if the guards suspect anything and either try to investigate or raise an alarm; but they do not seem curious enough. The door of the gatehouse stays closed, with bright flickering light behind the adjacent window telling her that they must be watching TV; the warehouse guards, deprived of such luxuries, return to their pacing almost immediately after the helicopter has passed. So much the better for her. She pulls out her phone, crouches down to make sure its screen is concealed from view and any reflected light is blocked, and taps a quick _OK 1_ message, sending it to Bruce's temporary number, as an indication that she is safely on the roof and undetected, or else he would be coming back for her.

Her next task is to find an anchoring point for the rappelling rope she has brought; after a quick inspection of the roof she identifies two antenna banks as her best chances, and from what she remembers of the internal layout, the one in the middle looks more promising than the one on her far left as it must be closer to Wu's office; she tests it for resistance, pulling at the antenna base with all her weight, and is satisfied to see that it holds. As soon as she has secured the rope around the base, she lets it out over the long side of the building and lies down, peering at the wall below, trying to figure out which window she has rigged so she can lodge her secondary anchor above it. She is fortunate on two counts, one of which she expected: just as she thought, the corridor wall is on the opposite side of the gate, warehouses, and guards, so when she needs to use the thermal lance, a staple burglar's tool, to bore deep shafts into the roof to secure the bolted loop to thread the cable through, she is hidden from view thanks to her position; and the unexpected but fortunate central location of the antenna bank means that her target window is almost directly below, resulting in minimal stress on the secondary anchor and thus letting her cut shallower holes.

The task complete and the rope dangling just off the side of the window – it wouldn't do to let it hang mid-window just in case – she attaches a sliding mechanism to the rope, secures it to her belt by a short cable, slides down until her foot finds purchase on the casement, and, crouching just slightly with both her feet on it, simultaneously gives the protruding slip of plastic a gentle tug to retract the latch and gives the window pane a gentle push to open it. Two more seconds later, she is standing in the corridor, the released rope dangling inside the window, the window itself pulled as near closed as possible. Bruce has done his job, not that she expected otherwise, and no one has discovered it; through her goggles she can see the windows on all three sensors covered in foam. She looks for the drones on the floor; five of them are next to the wall under the sensor at the corridor dead end, and it only takes a few seconds to pick them up and throw them into her utility pouch; she assumes that the remaining three are inside Wu's room. Pulling out the phone again, she types and sends _OK 2_; she is in the corridor and has picked up the corridor drones.

The key works as it did the first time, though in far less exciting circumstances. She chases the memory away; it won't do to get distracted, but she promises herself that once they are back in Lugano, they'll have wild nonstop sex for days on every surface, inside and outside, of the villa... assuming they both survive. Bruce sketched the approximate room layout for her from what he had picked up from the drone feed; given the priority of disabling the sensor, he did not make a detailed examination of the room, but it is a relatively limited space of about fifteen by twenty five feet, and just like the meeting room, it looks to have been plundered of fancier furniture to leave a large desk, a high-backed executive chair behind it, two simple chairs in front, and a two-seater sofa on her right next to the door leading to the reception, with a built-in cupboard adjacent to the en suite bathroom on her left clearly being the most likely location of the safe. She pulls open the first set of double doors to see rows of document folders; the second set shows Selina her target, and she breathes a huge sigh of relief. Bruce was right in the more optimistic of his guesses; Wu has replaced Varese's key-operated safe with a nothing fancier than a keypad-operated one, and judging by the size of the screen, it is only a four-digit combination. If she is lucky, she might not need the drill; though she'd have to be lucky indeed, as based on her experience, if she does not get the combination right the first three times, the bolt will likely lock in place and she will have to drill after all.

Her next step is to lightly dust fluorescent powder on the keypad with the brush applicator, and shine the UV blacklight. She is pleased to see clear shiny patches on four of the keys; at this rate she does not even need to compare prints to see which ones are Wu's. 4 8 9 0; she looks at the four bright spots – and the memory flashes through her mind so sharp and clear that she bites down on a scream of delight. Lugano, a week ago; Bruce and Theo digging for info on Tessuti Varese and the Chinese companies; her unintentionally funny remark about the forty-niners, Bruce's explanation about Triad codes. She is positive that these figures make up one of them, with four being the first number and zero definitely not in there. Knowing the four numbers has reduced the possible number of combinations from an unfathomable 3628800 to twenty four, and now with the Triad code likelihood, she is looking at only four of them, as the zero will be either first or last.

The trouble is, she is likely to have three attempts.

She tries the obvious "4 8 9 0"; nothing.

"4 9 8 0"; nothing.

She is left with two combinations and only one chance. A flutter of panic runs through her shoulders to her fingertips; she knows that she still has the drill option, but it means the difference between an hour's painstaking and potentially noisy work that could be difficult to make undetectable on the one hand and immediate success on the other. Concentrating all her mental effort on going a week back in time, she tries to remember the details. This must have been the number for the boss, who was also called Mountain Master or Dragon Head; if she ever had an unhelpful recollection, this is one. But then something else crosses her mind; they all started with a four, and in all those the following two numbers were in ascending order between them.

Her gloved finger trembles as she presses "0 4 8 9".

The safe opens.

xxx

Her _OK 3_ and _OK 4_ follow each other in a giddily quick succession. It is a matter of seconds to pick up the stick by the carbine at the end of the short chain attached to it, dust and seal it to preserve Wu's fingerprints, wipe the keypad clean, find and pick up the three drones in the room, carefully push the safe door closed so it looks locked – she figures that if Wu intends to open it before the stick is back in it, it won't matter if it is locked or not as the stick's absence will be discovered anyway, and this way she buys Gianfranco five seconds tomorrow morning – close the cupboard and exit the room, locking the door behind her. From there, it is a few more seconds to climb onto the window sill, attach the rope to her belt, this time in a dead lock rather than sliding mode, and close the window securely this time, once again using the slip of fingerprint tape but this time pulling it all the way out. The following three-meter climb back to the rooftop is slightly more challenging but still eminently doable, and once there, she sends the final _OK 4_ message that is Bruce's cue to come back for her. She thinks about untying the rope and taking it with her, but then decides against it. The rope is white and thus hardly visible against the pale yellow walls even in daylight, the far wall it is on is not visible from the rest of the grounds, and with the secondary anchor holding the rope in place out of a direct line of sight from the window, it does not present an immediate danger; this way, if the worst comes to the absolute worst tomorrow and they need an escape route other than the stairs, they can use it to get out of the building.

Once again the helicopter hovers in sight, a huge green insect with no headlights, but this time the lowered tow rope has a large, heavy round harness dangling from it, like a kid's soft swing seat, both to weigh it down and to give Selina something to jump onto and hold on to on the way back up into the cabin. And again the craft dips and slows down in its flight path when it is near the roof, so that all she has to do is hop into the harness, reattach her carbine, and wait to be lifted up until she is level with the skid, at which point Gianfranco helps her get in.

It seems that the ubiquitous Murphy's Law has given them an incredible reprieve.

xxx

The gloomy-faced Martignano is impressed, after all. When they briefly set down at Pisa Galileo to let Bruce take the stick to Lucius, he gets out to climb into the pilot's seat for the short flight back to Pistoia and shakes Bruce's hand before ceremoniously kissing hers, for good measure, even though she is staying on board, moving to the co-pilot's seat now.

"Who are you two?" he asks, probably not expecting an answer – and judging by Bruce's uncertain expression, probably unlikely to get one.

"They aren't saying," Gianfranco jumps in, "but they are the most dangerous people I know, and that includes Wu and his goons."

"You'll be relieved to hear that there are many people sharing your opinion, some of whom are in high-security prisons," Bruce reassures him, "but so long as you stay away from _her_ –" he does not even need to indicate who he means – "you have nothing to fear from either of us."

Almost unexpectedly, Gianfranco's response is neither a scowl nor a shudder, but a timid smile.

xxx

"Do you want the good news or the bad news?" From the way Bruce says it, it is clear which kind he thinks is predominant. He is looking in some amusement at Gianfranco and Selina seated on opposite sides of the living room sofa. He was still somewhat reluctant to accept the notion of Gianfranco driving Selina back from Pistoia to Prato, tight outfit and all, but had to accept it as the lesser evil as he was going to spend an unspecified amount of time examining the stick with Lucius before getting a taxi back to the villa. The sweet irony is, be it from respect or fear, Gianfranco never strayed within five feet of her ever since they arrived at the villa, and they spent the past hour talking and half-watching TV seated exactly as they are now.

"It's empty," Selina ventures. He shakes his head. "The files are fucked," is Gianfranco's guess. "No, not _that_ bad," he concedes, "but still a fucking pain. The stick is not only password protected but also, all the files on it are heavily encrypted. The paranoid fucker. Lucius cracked the password in real time when we were there, but the encryption is too strong. He's pulled the files off the stick to transfer them to his HQ for decryption, but he says that even with their servers, it'll take hours. We can only guess that the stick has what we need, but we won't know for sure what's on it, and we won't know until the end if the decryption succeeds or if there's some sort of booby trap code that will damage the files. Of course they'll make multiple copies and work on them simultaneously and keep one master copy of the original encrypted set as a backup, but it still means that most likely we have to go back there tomorrow."

"Unless Theo is able to get the orange notice issued before then, now that he has Wu's prints," Selina reminds him; sending the prints to Theo was another item on Bruce's to do list at the airport.

"He says he's sure he'll get it soon after 9 am," Bruce replies. "But we need to be there at eight so that Gianfranco can beat Wu to the safe. Even _that_ is cutting it pretty fine, but we can't legitimately show up earlier than that without setting off alarm bells. If we don't show up and Wu sees that the stick is missing, they'll do a runner as we said before, and destroy the plant. And if we don't have the files _or _the plant _or_ Wu, we'll just seem like a bunch of paranoid fools crying wolf even with the notice issued."

"Maybe the decryption will be finished before eight," Selina wonders.

"Lucius has asked his IT people to send me a short message when they're done, that way we'll know we can get out with or without the notice. But I wouldn't bet on it." He sits down, or rather slumps down, between them on the sofa. "There's one thing I think we should do," he continues, with a hint of uncertainty creeping into his voice. "I think Céline should either stay here or go back to Lugano tomorrow morning. The two of us can – "

She understands the reason for his uncertain tone now, and does not let him finish. Logic, not diamonds, is a girl's best friend, she thinks, even if all it gets her is a close brush with danger.

"And you think they won't be suspicious if _I _do a runner?" she confronts him. "I'm Gianfranco's fiancée, you know, and given how much I poked my nose into the proceedings today and how I kept rattling on about my family's money tied up in it, it would seem strange to say the least."

"It will seem less suspicious if you _both_ leave," Gianfranco offers. "It will look like you've sort of eloped together. I can go there on my own tomorrow and take my –"

Bruce does not let him finish. "No. If Céline won't leave, we all go there."

"You've already done all you could, more than you should have," Gianfranco says earnestly, and it is as touching a gesture of gratitude as she would have expected from him.

"Not yet," Bruce replies, and she shudders at the memory stabbing at her heart.

xxx


	18. Of shit and fans, part two

xxx

They leave the villa at 7:45 on the morning of the third day and are at Tessuti Varese just before eight. The gate guards scowl at them, but since their scrutiny does not reveal anything different from the two days and three checks before this one, they let them through. One of the guards escorts them into the building and stays there while he summons his fellow minder from the yarn warehouse who usually stays at the foot of the stairs; once the man is there, the gatehouse guard goes back, leaving the four of them in the room. As usual, Bruce has used his slow progress up the stairs because of the limp to secretly pull the memory stick out of his suit lining; he has now slipped it to Gianfranco, who goes for his bathroom break a short while later, and they sit and wait.

And wait.

Gianfranco does not come back in three minutes, or four, or five. Instead they hear a sound of hurried footsteps walking past the meeting room in the direction of Wu's office a few seconds after five minutes have elapsed. They are ready to bully their way past the guard to find out what is going on, but at that moment Zhang walks into the room and goes straight to the table, clearly intending for all of them to stay where they are, and so long as they still see the need to maintain any semblance of civilised, or at least civilian dealings, they are stuck. They may be as dangerous as Gianfranco suggests, but they do not know enough about what is happening outside to decide whether they would be justified in opening hostilities that would make them all into instant targets when they aren't the ones with guns in this building.

As soon as the curt greetings have been exchanged, Bruce seems to take Zhang's arrival as his chance to vent some pent-up frustration. "I don't want the girl here." The smooth low mechanical voice in her left ear is saying Bruce's words to her in English. "She is a nuisance with her stupid questions and with the way she thinks her family's money is all that matters. She may be Varese's fiancée, but she is nothing more than a bit of fun on the side to me and so long as Varese is not here I can say it openly. Can I just ask you to get her out of here and send her back to Prato?"

She fights to conceal her anger. Not at the way he refers to her – _that_ is perfectly consistent with their roles and her behaviour – but at his intention. It is obvious that they are fucked; if she needed any extra confirmation that he is as sure of it as she is, she saw it a minute ago when he surreptitiously tightened up his knee brace. And he is playing dirty trying to make sure that she gets out of here whether she wants it or not, in a way that does not let her argue.

Zhang, in a perverse fortunate turn, is not so sure. He says something noncommittal about their preference for dealing with all interested stakeholders at once, and seeing how it may not be a lost battle, she decides to speak up and asks them in Italian what is going on. If Bruce can play dirty, so can she; with the enemy's help, if need be.

Bruce _still_ tries to play dirty and tells her, in a cold impatient tone, that it would help save time and effort and would spare her hours of listening to boring technicalities if she let him and _her fiancée_ finish the negotiations, assuring her that they will do so with her interests in mind. While he is saying that, Zhang and the guard step away from the table to engage in a conversation of their own, and from the snippets the translator catches, it sounds like they are much more in favour of letting, or rather _making_ her wait in another room on the premises, most likely the archive, where the guard would accompany her. It might not be that bad an option, she thinks; disabling the guard will be a matter of seconds and can be conveniently done inside the archive as soon as the situation warrants it, although being far from the meeting room, she may not know the best timing for her reappearance.

Except that as soon as Bruce is satisfied that Zhang and the guard are not paying attention to them, he switches to English and implores her in a quiet, flat voice to _get. the hell. out_.

And in that instant, she sees a most unlikely emotion in his face.

Fear.

She can argue with him so long as he is acting in cold blood, or in anger; but seeing him like this makes further resistance seem like wilfully torturing him.

"Fine," she says in Italian, "I'll go out, but I'll wait outside this room until I can talk to Gianfranco so we can agree between ourselves."

Zhang looks like he is about to argue, but in the end decides against it. Standing in the doorway, she sees Bruce getting up from the table to talk to Zhang and the guard, still feigning the limp; he is obviously trying to keep their attention focused on him so she can get away unsupervised. She takes one last look at him and closes the door.

She may have obeyed him in getting out of the room, but she is damned if she is leaving.

xxx

She can hear Wu's and Xiao's voices coming from the reception to her right; it is only a thirty-foot distance away, and she is outside the reception room in five seconds. "He really seems clueless," Wu says. Before she has time to wonder if they are referring to Gianfranco or Bruce, his next words reveal the truth to her even as they make her blood run cold. "The boys have given him a good working over, and at least now he isn't going anywhere from my room. But we need to decide about the other two. I don't know if they are in on this, but it's likely. We need to keep them all here and make sure they don't have backup until we figure out how much they know and what to do with them. We'll have these two men stay here, I'll leave my office key with them so they can lock up one or both of the others in here as well, if needed. Maybe it's best to keep them separate for now and then bring them all here later, I'm sure the other two will find Varese's example... persuasive. Let's go talk to them and see what we need to do next." Knowing what she does about Wu and Xiao and the sort of business they run, she has no doubts that the _figuring out_ part will involve reducing the two of them to the same state as Gianfranco is presumably in. At least it sounds like he is alive... so far. But at this rate, it will be a matter of seconds, a minute or two at most, before she and Bruce are facing the guards and, most likely, before their phones are taken away – and apart from the obvious use, those phones are the only way Theo can track them and direct the ROS to their exact position if needed.

Except for...

She practically runs back in the direction of the meeting room, but instead of going in, she leaps down the stairs two at a time on her way to the restrooms, glad that the damned guard is still in the meeting room with Bruce and Zhang. She doesn't have much time, and only one chance to secure them a possible lifeline.

Mercifully, Theo picks up on the second ring.

"_Ciao, sono Chiara._"

"_Ciao bella, tutto bene?_" Theo sounds anxious, but still goes for the standard opener. It might be easier, at least for her, to speak English rather than Italian, but she does not know when she may be discovered, and she cannot risk Wu finding out that she speaks English, or else he will suspect her of overhearing his conversation with the PKK would-be buyer yesterday. For the same reason, she cannot call Lucius who is nearer to them than Theo is, apart from the fact that having a US-prefix call number in her history will seal their fate as suspected CIA agents.

"_Sì, sì. Siamo incasinati ma era da aspettare,_" she says, her worried tone belying the reassuring words. Things are screwed up but that was to be expected, indeed.

"_Ho parlato con i vicini, stanno per muoversi, adesso andatene,_" The neighbours are about to make a move; Theo must mean the Carabinieri Special Ops. And she would be happy for all of them to follow his advice that they get out now, if they only could.

"_Senti... ho bisogno di un favore. Ho lasciato la mia collana dal gioielliere per la pulizia e ho dimenticato di ritirarla." _She can hear Xiao calling out to her, an atrociously accented _Signorina!_ from behind the door. _"Prendi il mio vecchio cellulare nel ufficio, il codice è scritto dentro. Il gioielliere si trova sotto F, Fornaci o Fornarini, non ricordo, chiamagli e digli che è importante che ti aiuti subito di rintracciare la mia collana, se non la trovate adesso, siamo nei guai_," she rattles off on a single breath. – _Listen, I need a favour. __I left my necklace at the jeweller's for cleaning and I forgot to pick it up. Get my old cell phone at your office, the PIN code is written inside. The jeweller is under F in the address book, can't remember his name, call him and tell him that it's important that he helps you track down my necklace asap, if it isn't found right now, we're in trouble. _She purposely uses _rintracciare_, track, instead of the more usual _trovare_, find, trusting that Theo will pick up the meaning.

"_Questo cellulare è inutile_", this phone is useless, she finishes before Theo can respond, and cuts off the call when the restroom door abruptly opens and she is confronted by Xiao and the guard, with Xiao motioning her to give up the phone. Her earlier suspicion is confirmed when the first things Xiao does is take out the battery and pocket it before returning the phone to her and motioning her out of the restroom and back upstairs, where they march her to the archive at the far end before he leaves her there with the guard.

Theo knows their approximate location, but now that the phone is off, it is indeed useless; and Xiao is probably going to take Bruce's phone as well, or at least try to, and even if he does not succeed, it might get damaged, leaving her necklace tracker as the only reliable way of determining their exact position. Its maximum range is only about ten miles, but if the ROS are about to make their move, they will know to come to Castelletto anyway. It will just be a matter of Theo getting hold of the tracker ID and passing it on.

She remembers perfectly the single directory entry on her usual phone under F: _Fox, Lucius_, that holds his mobile number. She knows that by making this call and saying what she said, she has effectively abandoned the pretence of Bruce not being the nominally deceased owner of Wayne Enterprises, but right now, it looks like it is by far the least of their worries.

xxx

Xiao did not seem concerned about locking her up in the archive room, since it only has Varese's old files while they keep theirs in their offices and apparently keep all important information on the stick. So much the worse for him; once she is satisfied that Xiao has gone into the meeting room by the sound of the door opening at the other end of the corridor, it takes her five seconds to knock the guard unconscious, get his gun, and upset a bookshelf on top of his prostrate body for good measure. She does not care how many broken bones he may have, or if he will live, though she suspects that he might. She'd have few qualms shooting him, for that matter, but would rather not precipitate anything with the noise of a gunshot right now. She peeks out into the corridor; so far everything seems quiet, so she picks the reception room halfway down the hall as her next destination, figuring that she should at least try to find out what happened to Gianfranco.

Not surprisingly, there are two guards in the reception room. When they see her close and lock the door behind her, they stare at her in momentary incomprehension until she whirls into action to take out one of them in two seconds flat and similarly dispatch the other one two more seconds later, before they have had time to engage their brains and draw their guns on her. This really isn't the time to be concerned about excessive violence, merely excessive noise; she still refrains from shooting, but grabs both their guns and, taking the clip out of one of these for her own safety, hits each guard in turn over the temples with the grip of the gun as hard as she can, drawing blood and eliciting a sickening sound each time; if she has cracked their skulls or given them a concussion, so much the better; that way she can be sure that they won't follow her or cause trouble to others. She has a moment of panic when she rifles through their pockets looking for the key to Wu's office only to find them empty, until she sees it sticking out of a lock in the door leading into the other room.

Gianfranco is lying on the floor next to the desk, bloodied and sobbing, but alive, with duct tape over his mouth and his hands cuffed behind his back. He notices her and shakes his head when she comes up and crouches next to him, dropping the two guns on the bloodstained carpet; she figures that at least there should be no harm in pulling off the tape, and as soon as she has done that, the reason for his warning gesture becomes clear.

"Don't try to get me to stand up... I can't... they've broken both my legs."

It feels like a punch in the gut; she fights the bile rising in her throat even as she works to pick his handcuffs open with a pin she pulled out of her hair. At least judging by the huge pupils in his eyes, he must still be in shock and unable to feel the full extent of the pain. Still, she wishes she had brought painkillers, and wonders if she might have, after all.

"Do you still have the other key?" she asks, and is relieved to see him fumble in his jacket pocket and produce it. She has locked both the reception door and the door from the reception to Wu's office from the inside of the respective rooms, and would rather use a shortcut.

"Wu just had a fit of rage when he saw me here so he didn't think about how I got in, or ask me," he explains feebly, tears still rolling down his cheeks. "I suppose he thought I'd managed to open the same door he's been using."

"I'll be right back," she tells him as she takes the key and gets up. "I swear," she adds, seeing his worried look.

She runs back into the archive room, where the guard is now uttering soft moans but not stirring, and picks up her handbag before returning to Wu's office and locking the direct door from the inside with Gianfranco's key. But a fumble through the inside pockets of her handbag reveals no medicines.

"Did you manage to keep your phone?" she asks Gianfranco next, after pulling out a sofa cushion and setting it down to make an improvised pillow for him. It might be a hopeless idea to call an ambulance when the site is sealed off from the outside world, but at least that way it might be persuaded to stay and wait outside until they are freed.

Instead of an answer, Gianfranco points her to his phone lying discarded on the floor, its back cover open and the battery missing.

"Right," she mutters. A quick look at the desk shows that there is no landline phone, either. "Listen, I'm sorry about this..." She is shamefully aware of how lame it sounds.

"You shouldn't be." Apparently, having actually stared death in the face and having been subjected to excruciating pain has given Gianfranco a kind of fatalistic courage. "I'm sorry I fucked it up."

"Not your fault," she argues. "What happened?"

"Wu caught me at the safe with the door open, he and Xiao came in before I could lock it and saw me. I think they were sitting in Xiao's room just down the corridor, so they heard me walking past and came over to check." That finally explains why she and Bruce heard nothing until Zhang showed up, no footsteps or voices of people walking past the meeting room on their way to Wu's room to alert them to the fact that Wu and Xiao were already there. So 8 am must have been too late. "I'd only had a few seconds, I'd just put the stick into the safe and I was about to enter the code. At least this way he thought I was stealing it, he still doesn't know you've got the stuff off it. And then he was too furious and didn't want me to scream so he didn't really ask me anything, just put the tape over my mouth and had Xiao call in the guards." So those were the running footsteps they heard when Zhang joined them. If they'd only known, if they'd only decided to push their way out of the room, he might still be OK... except that Wu, Xiao and the guards would have locked the door on them from the inside, and without Gianfranco's key they would be facing a sealed room. "Listen, if I don't make it – "

"Bullshit." She interrupts him with more vehemence than is warranted, anger at his tormentors getting the better of her. "You _will_ make it. We're not going to be burying two generations of your family in as many weeks. Can you shoot a gun?"

"I... suppose I can," he says, uncertainly.

"Ever done it?"

"N-no," he admits.

"OK, look here." She picks up one of the guns, the one with the clip still in, and takes the safety off. "You hold it like this," she closes her fingers around the grip, "and pull the trigger. It's easy, just be prepared for the loud noise. I'll go get the second clip, just a sec," she adds, getting up. She unlocks the reception door and picks up the clip she took out when she struck the guards and left there in her hurry to get into Wu's office, noticing that the guards are still unconscious. Back in the office, she snaps the clip into place and disables the safety. "I'll shoot the locks on both doors to this room so no one can open them unless they ram them through, so you can be sure Wu's scum don't get in, and I'll shoot the reception door lock so those two assholes are trapped in the reception. We're expecting the ROS to get here soon, so it may be a good idea to take a look at who gets in before you shoot, but don't take too long deciding, they'll probably wear body armour anyway." She is about to go for the locks, but then remembers something else she wanted to ask him. "Did you see if Wu took the stick with him?"

"No," Gianfranco says quickly. He sounds excited to recall it now; the pain must have messed with his thinking too much for him to have remembered to mention it earlier. "He put it back in and reset the code. Maybe you could – "

She is at the safe with her handbag before he has finished, and he trails off, realising that she is planning to do just what he was about to suggest.

A few seconds later, the UV light reveals the fresh prints on four keys: 1 5 6 8. She closes her eyes, trying to figure out what the hell the combination might be. She does not have the drilling pack now so if she cannot guess it on three attempts, it's over. Maybe Bruce was right talking about explosives, after all. The first two figures give her a flash of hope; did he increase all the values in the old sequence by one? 0 4 8 9... does not add up. This one no longer has a four, so it is not a Triad code. She swears in frustration and shakes her head, but just as she opens her eyes and looks at the keypad again, she is struck by the shape made by the fluorescent pink dots in front of her. One in the upper left hand corner, two centre and right one line down, one centre another line down.

Damn, that's _it_.

This time, she presses "8 1 5 6" with a steady hand, and five seconds later, the stick is in her pocket.

"How did you guess it?" Gianfranco asks her, amazed.

"All he has done is shift his finger one line up from the original combination, 0 4 8 9. I remembered the shape I saw last night."

"Listen, seriously, are you people CIA? You can't just be a Swiss security firm, no one's that good. I won't tell anyone, I promise."

She chuckles in response. "I can swear that we aren't CIA. And we aren't from any other intelligence agency either. But I can't say any more than that. I have to get out, I wish I didn't have to make a lot of noise shooting the locks but I think it's best if I lock you in here – "

As if on cue, she hears gunshots from the corridor outside. She jumps up like a scalded cat, grabs one of the guns she is about to leave for Gianfranco, opens the reception door again, happy to see its occupants still slumped on the floor where she left them, and shoots the outside reception door lock twice. She then re-locks the door leading to it from Wu's office, takes out the key, and shoots it twice as well, for good measure, before putting the gun down by Gianfranco's side again so he has two guns and one and a half clips between them. She then kisses him on the temple and instructs him, not quite helpfully, to _try to stay alive_, and after flashing a quick grin at his _you too_, runs out of the room, locks the door, and shoots the lock with the archive guard's gun that she still has tucked into her belt. She has done all she could for Gianfranco, for the moment; but now that Bruce has obviously provoked Xiao, or the guards, or both, into shooting at him, she must try to find him and either provide covering fire or at least stay as close to him as she can, as her necklace is the beacon that their rescuers would be following. Maybe with the ultimate bargaining chip in her pocket, she can keep them alive long enough for the necklace to serve its purpose.

xxx


	19. Selina's payback

I couldn't stay away from writing this, so I had to wake up in the middle of the night to do it ;)

.

The meeting room is empty save for an unconscious guard next to the table; she stops by just long enough to take the clip out of his gun for a spare and whack him on the head with his own weapon to make sure he does not come around battle-ready. She runs a quick count in her head; of the twelve guards who must be on duty in a single shift according to their estimate, between her and Bruce they have taken out four so far; she is positive that at least two of the three gatehouse guards will stay where they are to block the entrance to the site, not to mention the exit from it, leaving six plus Xiao, Zhang and Wu himself for Bruce and her to deal with.

A few feet from the guard, she sees the broken remains of Xiao's walkie-talkie – Bruce must have got hold of it somehow to stop Xiao from calling reinforcements and coordinating his men – but no discarded cell phones; either he still has it or Xiao does. Back in the corridor, she throws the empty gun out of the nearest window and, pulling out the loaded one she is carrying, she turns left and heads downstairs.

At the bottom of the stairs is Zhang, whimpering from what looks like a gunshot wound to the chest; either it was an accidental case of friendly fire or Bruce used him as a shield not thinking that Xiao would shoot at a fellow gangster; she is past caring so long as he is out of the action. This leaves eight adversaries instead of nine... unless Xiao or Wu manage to call in the second-shift guards. Which, she realises grimly, must be the reason she now sees Xiao running out of the building, chasing a gangly man who does not look like a guard. Must be one of those two real technicians that Bruce mentioned, who looks to have chosen this moment to make himself scarce, but Xiao's real reason for running out must be to reach the gate and either instruct the gate guards to call in the second shift, or do so himself. She can only hope that they are housed far enough away to buy her and Bruce a few more minutes.

On his way Xiao almost bumped into two guards, one of whom she recognises from the gate, who now burst into the weaving machine room ahead of her and to her left with their guns drawn before she has had time to shoot them. She can hear the voices and shots coming from within the room, but when she gets to the doors she discovers that they won't open inwards without a key. She kicks the door and swears in frustration, but it gets her nowhere. So long as they are still shooting, Bruce must be alive; but she hates having to use _that_ as an indicator. At the worst count, there are seven of them in there versus one of him, including six of them with guns; she would not call these odds uneven in hand-to-hand combat, but a gunfight is another matter.

At that instant, she hears Wu yelling from further inside the room. The first time her gadget does not decipher it, but when he repeats the words, the _Bùyào pāi _is reported to her as _Don't shoot_; and indeed, the gunfire stops. She wonders if it is a good thing... either it is the worst-case scenario meaning that he is down and wounded and soon to be taken captive, or a not-quite-best-case one meaning that he has done something dangerous enough to rule out firearms. Trouble is, in that case it would be just as dangerous _to him_.

A final desperate kick at the double doors still achieves her nothing; she can either wait to see if Xiao comes back, assuming that he would have the key, which could be any length of time later, or try to chase Xiao outside, which would take her and the pearls further away from Bruce...

...or find another way to get closer to him. She turns back to the stairs and practically flies to the upper floor.

xxx

The rope is still where she left it, dangling off the central window. She is sorry not to have the sliding mechanism with her as it will take a few seconds longer to rappel down, but at least she is glad she is wearing a Kevlar-lined pantsuit. As soon as she has reached the ground-floor windows –a nearly-continuous strip of glass high along the production room walls – she fashions a crude sort-of-harness for herself using the free end of the rope and, sitting suspended in it, flips up the big stone on her ring to reveal the carbide cutting wheel. It takes a few seconds and careful handling to cut out a rectangular pane of glass the height of the window, about three feet, and wide enough for her to slip through, and she has to cut out and push through tiny holes at the top corners first so she can grip the glass and pull it toward her to fling it down outside, where the noise will be less noticeable to the room occupants, rather than push it inside where it would shatter with a loud crash.

She sees now that her descent trajectory has put her at the middle of the chemical treatment room; she could think of better entry points and has a moment of worry wondering if she will be able to get into the weaving room from there, but at least she can see that she won't need the rope once she is inside, as she is directly above the elevated gangway running along the side of the room nearest to her, less than seven feet below the window ledge. And now that she is no longer cutting glass and has an unobstructed window into the room, she can hear the fight inside; Bruce must have led them in there, no doubt figuring that a room full of complex equipment is both a better hiding place and not a good venue for firefights. It sounds like he is right; she still cannot hear any shots.

Still sitting in the harness, she pulls out the USB stick from her pocket and fastens it to the side of her necklace with the carbine; that way she won't have to worry about it falling out, and it will be easily deployable as her bargaining tool if necessary. Next, she takes off her shoes and sticks them into her jacket pockets – it won't do to land with a loud bang her heels are bound to make on the metal gangway floor – and climbs through the opening she has cut, pulling the rope harness inside the window with her and hanging from the ledge before dropping softly about a foot or two down to the gangway.

Getting her bearings, she sees that she is indeed in the middle of the room lengthwise, hidden from view by the equipment, storage tanks, and pipes standing between her and the flat treatment vats and dryer units flanked by the open passage along the opposite side. The room is about twenty feet high, and now that she is crouching on the seven-foot-high gangway, her position puts her line of sight about halfway up.

There are steel beams, about ten feet apart and two-thirds up the room height, running parallel to the short wall and carrying fluorescent lighting strips in addition to their structural reinforcement purpose; they must be thirteen feet above the ground and six feet above the gangway floor, with the nearest one just over her head. Perhaps she can attach the rope to the beam and swing down and over across the room... but she dismisses the idea as unfeasible; even if there was enough rope left, which there isn't, to do that she would need to fasten the rope securely to the centre of the beam, instantly revealing her position. With a thirteen-foot drop to the ground, climbing onto the beam and jumping down would make it anyone's guess whether she would land in a condition to fight unless she managed to crouch down and hang from the beam by her hands before jumping; still not the best option.

She can see a ladder leading down from the gangway at the far end of the room, but it would take too long to go there, climb down, and run the length of the room to join the fight, not to mention that it would leave no element of surprise whatsoever; besides, she needs to know the reason for the apparent ceasefire before she can decide whether to draw her gun. So she scuttles over, still barefoot, keeping her head down and her shoulders hunched, to the weaving room end where the others are, hoping that there will be a ladder there as well.

No such luck; she is stuck seven feet above ground and about twenty five feet across from the action, with no easy way of descent as she is behind the storage tanks for what must be the solvent for the toxin treatment, if she remembers what Lucius said correctly. But now that she is closer and can smell the sharp chloroform-like odour, she understands why no one is shooting. There is a sort of mist spreading from a burst tube at a juncture point where it goes into the toxin treatment vat, the noxious vapour slowly filling the room with what looks like a more concentrated layer at the bottom. Carbon disulfide, Lucius said, extremely flammable and with a low boiling point, which means that it evaporates quickly and is also highly explosive in vapour form. No wonder Wu ordered his goons not to shoot; he does not want his little poison factory blown up unless there are no other options, especially while he is in it; and no wonder Bruce has led the chase to a spot where he was able to reach the right spot to inflict the damage that could impose this sort of stalemate.

Except that it is not really a stalemate. From what she sees with a growing sense of thrill, it is clear that now that Bruce has levelled the playing field and forced the other men into unarmed combat, he definitely has the upper hand. He has already dispatched two of the guards – she can only see four of them plus Wu in the room – and they can do virtually nothing to him, even without the Batsuit and the fancy gadgets. She has seen quite a few fights, and is pretty good at it herself, but what she is watching is a master class, his moves efficient, effortless and almost elegant; almost as if he were toying with them, while Wu, who has been staying out of it, is standing there obviously debating whether to try to engage this major threat himself or retreat until reinforcements arrive. In a matter of seconds, Bruce has dealt with the other three men and is in the process of disabling the fourth...

...when Xiao creeps in from the weaving room while Bruce has his back to him and leaps up to him to hit him on the back of his head with the butt of an assault rifle.

xxx

Dimly, through the haze of shock in her head, she hears Wu yell his _Bùyào pāi _at Xiao when he flips the weapon around and aims it at Bruce; Xiao scowls but obeys. Bruce, amazingly, rolls back to his feet and manages a vicious kick at Xiao, but he is still reeling from the blow and it does not take long, now that it has become an uneven fight in a different way, for Xiao and Wu to subdue and handcuff him.

"His phone got a message," Xiao barks to Wu, and she hears it in the incongruously even English tones. "I can't read English," Xiao adds, perhaps unnecessarily, as he hands the phone to his boss. She wonders what could have made Bruce surrender it; perhaps he threw it at Xiao as a distraction tactic, or walked up to hand it over as a way to go for the other man's walkie-talkie as a higher-value target; doesn't matter by now. What matters, unfortunately, is that Xiao had no time to take out the battery and Bruce apparently considered the phone a limited threat and forgot about the Wayne Enterprises IT people and their message, and forgot to disable the message alert that he set up last night so he could hear it, or rather feel the vibration, when she sent her _OK_ messages while stealing the stick.

Wu stares at it, reads it out loud in a harsh accent. "_We have it all_." He translates it for Xiao and frowns. "American number. I told you they were CIA, both of them, you dumb fool." He looks as if he is about to kick his lieutenant before he thinks better of it, unfortunately, and instead hands the phone back to Xiao, who promptly smashes it with the rifle butt before flinging the rifle aside and turning to Bruce once again.

"You fucking spy," Xiao hisses as he kicks his adversary, who is now unable to retaliate. "Fuck you," Bruce snarls back, in English, and on hearing that, both Wu and Xiao set upon him with their fists and feet until he is unconscious, and she bites her lip until she draws blood so as not to scream while she struggles in vain to block the memory of another uneven fight a few months ago and wrestles with the rising panic to think of a way of stopping them.

At present, they do stop; but the reason makes her heart stand still.

"Take him away out of here and shoot him," Wu orders. "Then we look for the woman."

She is paralysed with dread; all she can see is Bane, dragging his unconscious form, still in the black armour but with the face unmasked, out of sight, away from her, to a likely death. All she can remember is herself, the traitor, watching from behind iron bars, her conscience burning with the fresh brand of shame at what she had allowed to happen.

It is happening again.

But this time, there are no bars keeping her away, and she knows what she is going to do.

She climbs up on the metal railing of the gangway and on to the narrow steel beam above.

xxx

"Wu Ming!" The man starts, then turns abruptly, tipping his head up at the unexpected summons. He scowls when he sees her balancing halfway down the beam and a good seven feet over his head, a gun in her hand, flicking the safety. She had a momentary attack of dizziness when she straightened up on the beam a couple of seconds ago – the solvent vapours from below must be getting to her as well – but the cold steel beneath her feet is sobering her up.

"Stupid bitch." The translator helpfully conveys Xiao's words to her. Wu says nothing. Xiao picks up his assault rifle and aims it at her, thinking she will believe his bluff.

"You know you can't do it, or else you'll blow this place up, unless that's what you want," she mocks in English, giving up the pretence now that it no longer matters, ignoring the fact that Xiao cannot understand her; it is good enough that Wu can. "The moment either of us shoots, this whole room will explode. I don't care, I've lost all my family's money anyway," she adds, remembering her invented backstory, brandishing the gun to show them that the safety is now off. "Same goes if either of you tries to come up here," she says, seeing Xiao eyeing the gangway. "Or if you do anything else I don't like. But if you leave _him_," she tips her head at Bruce, unconscious at Wu's feet, "and your weapons here and back off to the other room, I may be persuaded not to do it."

"You're making a serious mistake," Wu hisses at her in his mangled accent. The incongruous flashback does nothing to help her state of mind, but by now, the crazier she is, probably the better. Besides, few mistakes could be more serious than the one she already made back then.

"Maybe," she concedes. "But if you don't get out and leave him here," she repeats, "you're both dead and your factory is finished." It is the perfect Mexican standoff; both parties hold the means to each other's destruction, and neither one can shoot. Even if they do obey, it will leave her and Bruce without an obvious exit route; but she hopes that they may survive long enough for the ROS to get in there.

She stands there, on a narrow beam above a vat of poison; and she is suddenly at peace, looking down at Wu glaring up at her, Xiao swearing under his breath, and Bruce lying face down on the concrete floor, the man she once left lying on the floor of his manor house study and has left lying broken on the floor of Bane's hell; now she has come back for him, a second time. So this is what it feels like to offer one's life for a good cause; she is no saviour of cities and not much of a saviour of men, but she now knows exactly how he felt when he flew the nuke over Gotham Bay, not knowing if he'd make it... if she keeps him alive now, it will have been her greatest achievement, better than billion-dollar heists. This is her gravitational singularity, the point where everything comes together, where Selina Kyle the treacherous thief and Céline the repentant woman in love find their joint redemption, where she becomes _him_ for a brief moment. _If you can't beat them, join them_; she has had enough of Bruce's suicidal tactics, so she is adopting them. This is her judgement day, her declaration of love and plea for forgiveness to a man who cannot hear it; this is it.

She remembers her fleeting thought in China, five thousand feet above Xining, that there could be worse ways to die than up in the air and looking at him; now may be her chance, but she wants to be sure that he makes it, and at any rate that he does not see her die, if that is how it ends. She looks down at Wu, livid and rearing like a snake, who cares about nothing but his poison and his money; _she_ cares about nothing in the world right now, not Syria or China or even the Varese family, just an unconscious man she has twice seen going to his death, having once led him to it; a man she now cannot imagine her life without. And it gives her perfect freedom, and makes her laugh with relief: her debt has been paid, her burden has been lifted – and seeing her up there laughing, Wu and Xiao believe her, and are scared of her.

And at that moment, bad timing to trump all bad timing, Bruce comes around, still groggy from the solvent he has been breathing, twists his neck, and sees her. She cannot hear him but can clearly make him out saying _you idiot_, looking at her in unadulterated terror because he knows exactly what she is doing. Forgive me, my love; you would have done the same.

And then, as if she were watching a film, she sees the sealed central doors to her left falling outward and hears the weaving room doors behind the wall to her right smashed in, and watches as the Carabinieri ROS men run in wearing protective suits and masks, apparently knowing not to shoot. She flicks the gun safety on and tucks it into the waist of her suit again, and turns to walk back and jump back onto the gangway, but a movement below catches her eye: by then Wu has understood that she was bluffing to gain time and that he has lost everything, and has tried to make a dive for Xiao's assault rifle before the Carabinieri get to him. He cannot reach it but he does manage to pull a handgun from the holster at his lieutenant's side and even now is taking it off safety. It does not matter where he aims it; the shot will trigger the explosion, and while the ROS team may survive and even she might stand a slim chance if she holds on to the beam and manages to crawl back on it to make it back to the open window, Bruce will have no hope down below where the heavy solvent vapour is at its thickest.

She does the only thing she can; crouching down on the beam, she dives down thirteen feet to tackle Wu. She lands on top of him and they crash to the ground, sharp searing pain exploding in her stomach where his gun digs into it, seemingly echoed all over her body, turning her vision to black. Through the dark haze, she sees Wu's wild eyes focus on the memory stick dangling from the pearls around her neck, and with his free hand he yanks at it, a useless desperate gesture as by now he will have no time to either hide or destroy it. All it does is break the string and send the pearls spilling – and the last things she knows before her eyes roll into her head and her mind succumbs to darkness are the pearls scattering across the floor and Bruce screaming her name at the top of his lungs.

.

I'll take a few days' break now; as an angst junkie, I was dying to write this one and now want to relish this point for a little while before I move on. Don't know how many of you are spoiler-averse, but I suspect I need to assure the rest that I have not snuck up a deathfic on unsuspecting readers. Still, I _am_ a sucker for heroic acts of self-sacrifice, and ever since I decided to go ahead with this plot, I wanted to write a matching bookend to the first Bane fight scene from the film... which to me, the second Bane fight just _wasn't_ ;)

By way of a score for the second half of this, I had in mind a huge favourite, Hans Zimmer's _Injection_ from M:I-2 (the film was OK, the score superb; but then I am obsessed with Zimmer's music even outside the Nolan trilogy scores). Every time I imagine a heroic sacrifice scene of some kind (a chronic thing, yes ;) ) I think of this one. youtube*com/watch?v=j3iAzdbg3mo

For a good look at a Christian Bale character kicking serious ass, it's worth checking out an early film of his called _Equilibrium_. Not a masterpiece, and with a bleak post-apocalyptic premise, but worth watching as it has three Bale-centric merits: he looks obscenely gorgeous in it, has a compelling (and needless to say, well-acted) character arc from major baddie to major hero, and has superbly choreographed, breathtakingly spectacular fight scenes. Unlike Batman, his character there has no issues with using firearms (and shoots what looks like a few hundred rounds of ammo), but when I thought of Bruce going against the guards here, I thought of Christian's _Equilibrium_ fights.


	20. On the mend

Lots and lots of love to all reviewers, I am glad I did not disappoint with what I was looking forward to as my star chapter. I hope the rest will hold up. I won't pretend I am not sad to leave the action part behind, but the story needs to be wrapped up. Never thought this one would end up being the longest chapter of the whole thing, though.

To the guest who remarked on the likely nature of Selina's injuries: I could not reply to you directly, but you were spot-on :)

.

She wakes up to an unusually fuzzy world. Her body feels weightless and heavy at the same time; she must be on drugs. She cracks an eye open; there is muted light, reflected sunshine seeping through slanted Venetian blinds, there are muted sounds from somewhere outside the room, but the room itself – a private ward in a hospital, by the look of it – is shaded, still, and quiet. Beyond the blinds, she can just about make out the clean white lines of a modern glass-walled atrium building flanked by slim white columns; a memory floats up from a while back, of walking into that same atrium late in the evening. San Giovanni di Dio, where they went to find out the truth about Giacomo Varese's autopsy results. Seems like yesterday, or years ago; at least she isn't in the mortuary. Thank heaven for small mercies.

Her eyes are sore and disobedient when she tries to swivel them to take in more of the room, not that there is much to see. There are no IV drips attached to her arms; so she probably did not get a gunshot wound, after all. Recent events resurface piecemeal in her mind, the confusion likely the effect of the drugs she is under. She cannot recall the exact sequence that has brought her here, but her memory offers her an array of out-of-order snapshots. Three of them in a meeting room with the Triad gang; herself pacing the corridor outside listening in to conversations while pretending to be engaged in phone calls; standing on a steel beam high up in a room filled with a noxious chemical mist; Bruce looking at her as she is being wheeled into an ambulance in an oxygen mask, unable to say a word and barely able to open her eyes, his face set and grim like a gargoyle's, his eyes unseeing with the fear still frozen in their dark depth; Gianfranco lying in Wu's office, a bloody patch on the carpet under his face; herself jumping down on a black roof amid the eerie green glow of the night-goggle vision. She knows, more or less, what has brought her here, but it will probably take more time to get the memory straight.

She tries to get a sense of the extent of her injuries, not an easy thing with the painkiller blocking out most sensation, though she should probably be grateful for that. Her best bet must be moving her eyes enough to see, or moving her hands to feel where the bandages are. She remembers Wu's gun digging into her stomach, the explosion of pain robbing her of breath. But when she runs her hand over the hospital gown, she can feel no bandage underneath. Carefully she brings up her hand to hold up the fabric so she can glance down the neckline; all she can see is skin and an ugly purple bruise a couple of inches below her solar plexus. That's what it was, then; the gun knocked out her breath and inflicted some blunt damage, but the shot was never fired; given the height she had jumped from, she probably broke Wu's wrist on impact so he could not fire that shot no matter how much he wanted to. Still, that sort of injury, nasty as it is, should not have kept her in a hospital bed; she would have been given painkillers, sure, perhaps an ice pack, perhaps she would have been told to stick to liquid food for a few days to let her bruised stomach recover, but surely they wouldn't have kept her here – if there had been any internal ruptures, there would have been a bandage to cover up operation stitches. But before she has time to get really confused, she shifts in bed, and the hot, heavy weight on her right leg answers her question.

The leg is in a solid cast from mid-thigh to the tips of her toes. It must have taken the brunt of her landing, which broke whatever bones have now been left to set under that cast. In all likelihood, it was bad enough to have required an operation, maybe more than one. She is definitely grateful for the painkiller now; who knows how bad it would be otherwise. But the good thing is, she still has the leg attached, in fact both legs and both arms, she can still move her left leg, which means no spinal injuries, and can still turn her neck, and in a bigger-picture sense of things, she is still alive. Now that her disjointed recollections of the past three days' events are slowly settling into place, she is aware that a while ago – a few hours, a day, whatever – she was less than sure she would live to see this day.

And much as it pains her to remember Bruce looking at her with that frozen expression before the ambulance doors block the view, the memory means that he is definitely alive and most likely unhurt.

xxx

She must have drifted off because the nurse wakes her up when she comes in, and puts up the usual concerned-carer fuss at seeing her awake. Does _signorina_ need anything, how is she feeling, what a shame it is that she is in this condition, it will get better eventually, all of it an attempt to be solicitous and none of it terribly helpful. Minimal answers combined with pointed enquiries soon yield a fuller picture; she has a displaced kneecap fracture and compound ankle fracture, both of which had to be operated on, but no other serious injuries save for the stomach bruise. She has been in the hospital for about 24 hours, give or take a couple, having been brought in an ambulance from Prato. She is the only in-patient admitted from there; a question about the whereabouts of Gianfranco Varese results in a call to the matron that in turn results in the nurse telling her that he is recovering at Santa Maria Novella, another hospital that also sent an ambulance to the site, and that _signor Wainwright_ was never admitted to either but if he is the tall dark-haired serious gentleman, he was here last night. So far, so good. It would be even better if she had a working phone, but she can't have it all at once. Best of all, the nurse says that the matron will now call him to tell him that she is awake.

Worst of all, the call produces exactly nothing. At least for a while. She has coaxed the nurse into switching on the TV and stared without really watching at a stupid game show and a news broadcast, has been given a glass of water with an assortment of pills, and has watched the sunlight outside shift until it has given way to pre-dusk shadows; and Bruce is nowhere to be seen. She is on the verge of begging for a phone and is already trying to remember the exact sequence of Theo's mobile number so she can ask him to track Bruce down on whatever phone he is using at the moment, which on balance is less embarrassing than getting the matron to call Bruce again for her, when the nurse steps back in, announcing his arrival.

But when he walks into the room, she is paralysed with dismay.

It seems that she is looking at a stranger. The face is familiar, but the way he pulls up a chair to within at least two feet of the bed, sits down and looks at her, it is as if she did not know him. Worse, it is as if he did not know _her_... or didn't want to.

"How are you?" he asks, his voice cold, almost harsh.

"Fine," she smiles faintly, her courage out on a limb. "You?"

"Good," he replies before they descend into a terrifying silence.

She wants to say a dozen things at once, do something to break this scary spell, wishing she could wake up and see the man she knows instead of this cold newcomer who seems uncomfortable in the same room with her to the point of being desperate to leave. Surely she hasn't changed so much in the space of a day for him to find her repulsive?

"I'm sorry," she starts.

"Don't," he cuts her off. And then he sits and stares again.

"So... what have you been up to?" she ventures in a faltering voice. If she doesn't say something, he will end up either breaking down in tears or kicking him out, and neither is particularly productive. The way things look, he will be out of here before long in any case.

The question revives him somewhat; it is really not much, but it is a start. Probably. Hopefully. "All sorts of things, it's been really busy since yesterday. Both the Carabinieri and the State Police are all over the place, asking questions, and between you and Gianfranco in hospitals, I've been the only one out of handcuffs they could talk to. Then the Interpol liaisons arrived from Rome and wanted to know what I knew about the Chinese connection. Then the fucking journalists showed up and I had to hide away from them and beg the police and others to keep our faces and names out of the media. I'm going to Rome tomorrow to talk to the head of the Interpol NCB and the Carabinieri officers," he finishes with a hint of relief that sends a spike of pain through her chest; he seems happy to have an excuse to be away from her. "I'll try to stop by on my way there, but I'll probably be there until late." She is so angry that she almost wants to tell him not to bother, but knows that if she says it she will regret it tomorrow if not tonight. Best to keep her options open; there is no telling how much she may end up missing him. Worst of all, of course, is that she is missing him _right now_.

"Hey, you started this," she reminds him, trying desperately and unsuccessfully to sound light-heartedly snarky. "You wanted to get to the bottom of this and you did, don't blame the cops now for being all over you."

He sounds almost normal again. "I don't mind the cops so much as the journalists. They don't really get a lot of sensational news here, and this has brought everyone from the _Corriere della Sera_ to five different TV channels to the local Prato bloggers and the weekly tabloid queuing to talk to anyone involved. And since the ROS team are off-limits and their bosses and the cops didn't know much as of yesterday, it kind of left me as the target of choice. I had to book a hotel room in the centre of Florence just to lose them."

"Get them to talk to Gianfranco," she suggests. "He shouldn't mind."

"I tried," he admits. "The doctors at Santa Maria Novella wouldn't let anyone talk to him yesterday with the medication and all and while they needed to set the bones. They probably got through to him today, there were certainly fewer of them outside the Carabinieri office just now."

"How's he doing?" She hopes he does not see this as a jealousy-inducing query. The ground between them is shaky enough as it is.

"About the same as you," he answers. He does not sound happy, but does not sound jealous, either. "Broken bones but he'll live. I haven't seen him today, but his girlfriend is finally back from Bali, last thing I heard yesterday was that she was going straight to the hospital from the airport."

Well, it is good _someone_ has a significant other who wants to spend time with them, she thinks sourly, and has to bite her tongue to keep the thought to herself. The conversation peters out again after this, they sit and wait for nothing, he looks around the room and avoids her eyes, the silence stretches.

"I should be going," he mutters when the tableau has gone all the way past awkward into unbearable. "I'll have to take an early train into Rome tomorrow, can't take the car, there's no way to find parking in that city. I can stop by on my way if you want –"

She wonders if she should spare him the misery and tell him not to bother, but neither her anger nor her willpower is strong enough, as it turns out. Besides, she doesn't want to make it easy for him. "Sure. I've been asleep so long in the past twenty-four hours, I'm pretty sure I'll be awake early tomorrow."

"See you in the morning, then," he offers, the visible relief in his face making her want to take back her words. He stands up and finally takes a step toward her...

...to kiss her on the cheek.

By the time he has closed the door behind him and she is sure he has walked far enough down the corridor, she can finally let the bitter tears run free.

xxx

In retrospect, she is lucky she slept through the morning, she figures when the nurse has brought her breakfast the next day, for two reasons. First, she is not really sure she would have withstood another encounter with Bruce like the one the day before with her composure and her dignity intact. Second, she was just awake enough, or had woken up enough, to catch him sitting next to her in the pre-dawn dusk, on the edge of the bed and not in a chair a safe distance away, his fingers light on her forearm, his lips on her forehead. Not much, but a hell of a lot better than a peck on the cheek that was a split second longer than an outright insult. Still, not enough to justify the nurse's remark, behind the door where she must have assumed she was out of Selina's earshot, in response to the matron who commiserated with the _povera ragazza con la gamba tutta spaccata_, that she was nonetheless lucky _di avere un fidanzato che la tiene così_. She can see sense in the matron's words about her leg being all in pieces, but she is damned if anything that has happened, or _not_ happened, between her and Bruce in the past forty-plus hours can justify her being considered lucky to have a boyfriend who, literally, _holds her like that_. The nurse must have very low expectations of men's affections, if she is that easily impressed.

By the _next_ morning, having spent the remainder of the previous day on her own with the insipid TV for company, she has really had enough. The doctor and nurses are all kind to her and she should not really be complaining, but she has had enough of being confined to a hospital room, nothing to do, no one to really talk to, the unfamiliar surroundings amplifying her sense of enforced helplessness, the drab gown, the fucking bedpan, the bland food, and she can't really begin to imagine what it must have been like for Bruce to have spent _six weeks_ like that, and when his injuries were more grave and his overall condition was much worse. Not to mention the months he spent in prison with a broken back... but she can't go there yet in her fragile mental state. Still, she can understand now what he meant by saying that being in a coma had its advantages, and by saying that she didn't miss much by not being by his side. Much as she is missing him, part of her is also glad that he is not there to fully witness her pitiful state. Maybe _that's_ what it is, he is avoiding her because of the hospital setting bringing back unwelcome memories of his own stay. Maybe once she is out of there and they are once again out of Florence, things will get better.

It looks like she is about to see her theory put to the test, because later that morning, the doctor tells her that her stay is over and Mr Wainwright is taking her back.

xxx

She has the deepest sympathy for Theo, who will be picking up humongous Italian speeding fines through no fault of his own, what with the maniac next to her driving twice over the speed limit. She is surprised to see that they are not yet being chased by the police; had they been in the States, they would have had a county's worth of black-and-whites providing escort. Here, they have probably cottoned on to the fine-generating potential of Bruce's little trip and are rubbing their hands in anticipation of the windfall it will provide. At least the highway traffic is relatively light so with any luck, fellow drivers will survive sharing the road with him without a heart attack.

Which is not necessarily the case for her. The driving speed has nothing to do with it; she is not among the faint-hearted. But the way he sits there, looking at the road – probably a good thing at that speed, but still – without saying a word, with her unable to even see his face as her seat is pushed all the way back to accommodate her leg that is encased in the cast practically straight with just the tiniest hint of a bend at the knee, makes her think that the most terrifying version of Bruce is not the one with the mask on, nor the openly furious one, but _this_. She is beginning to sympathise with Gianfranco and his struggle to cope with Bruce just sitting and staring at him. In her case, he isn't even staring, just completely ignoring her, and if anything, it is worse.

By the time they are twenty miles south of Milan, having covered the distance from Florence in an undoubtedly record-breaking hour and a half, she cannot take it anymore. In less than an hour they will be back in Lugano, and the thought of sharing the house with him _in this state_ is frankly blood-curdling. Not because she really has anything to fear, but because she knows that he will spend as much of his time as possible in whatever parts of the villa that she is _not_ in. And even apart from that, the tension is breaking her; it is as if he'd rather be anywhere than near her.

She slaps her hands against the glove compartment door; it gets his attention though he does not slow down. "Whatever it is you want to say, say it. Call me whatever you want, get it over with. I can't take it." She exhales with marginal relief; speaking out loud has helped her somewhat in itself. She can only hope he will follow suit.

She had no idea that a car doing 120 mph can veer off into the emergency lane and stop in three seconds flat, and is amazed that the other drivers have not ganged up on their car to murder him for that manoeuvre. Theo _will_ undoubtedly want to murder him for leaving half the tyre rubber on the road, but that is not yet an immediate risk. Unlike Bruce, who, in that instant, seems to have finally and suddenly lost it.

"_You_ can't take it?!" he growls at her; she is almost afraid to look in his direction, preferring to stare straight ahead, but it looks to her like his hands are shaking where they are holding the steering wheel. "Do you… How could you do that? How could you even _think of_ doing that? I _told_ you to get out!" He is absolutely furious, and if she weren't strapped into her seat she would have flinched; but somehow she still thinks that this is better than the silent treatment she has seen thus far. "How the fuck did I end up with a suicidal maniac?"

She cannot help it. "Look who's talking," she retorts; probably proving that she really _is_ a suicidal maniac. But it is a relief not to hear him talk like a stranger anymore; and while his voice is pure Batman, the oddly defenceless expression is pure Bruce. He does not reply to her barb, just sits there fuming, and she dares to continue in a more serious vein; maybe they will end up discussing things in a reasonable way. "I couldn't watch you die a third time," she says simply. "You didn't hear it, but Wu was telling Xiao to get you out and shoot you. I couldn't let that happen."

This shuts him up again, which she is not happy about. Just when she is about to go on and say that she was never in that much danger, which frankly is contrary to what she thought at the time but none of his business, he answers. "And you think _I _could watch _you_ die? You think I could get over it when the two most important women in my life died because of me, my mother because I was a scared kid and Rachel because I was too desperate to stay with her?"

It hurts, not only because of the _two women_. She cannot believe how he can still keep blaming himself for events that were clearly not in his power to influence. And part of her is stupidly jealous of a dead woman who never wanted to be with him anyway. "I'm not Rachel," she retorts in a quiet, stubborn voice. "I'm not this perfect innocent angel you've been mourning. It's just me." She may not have Rachel's exalted status in his mind, but being second best should have the benefit of not being irreproachable.

And at that moment, he _really_ loses it.

He does not shout, or say anything at any volume, or even turn to her. He flinches as if struck, and turns away, and gets out of the car. She wonders with a vague sense of dread if he will walk away and leave her alone here, but he stands leaning against the hood on his side, facing away from her, and it looks as if he has no intention of ever getting back in.

After a couple of minutes of this, she could not possibly feel any more useless or stupid... or guilty. OK, he is overdoing it with the Rachel-worship, but she really had no business talking about her like that. On somewhat more sober reflection, her words, meant only to highlight the difference between her and Rachel, if anything to Rachel's relative advantage, must have sounded like mockery. If she could get out and walk up to him she could have tried to explain, but instead she is stuck inside without so much as a pair of crutches; they brought her up to the car in a wheelchair and she cannot take a single step unless she is holding on to something with both hands, and even then it would not so much be a step as an awkward hop. But the way things stand, she is going to have to go with that option.

She opens the door on her side, lifts her right leg by holding the cast with both hands, and sets the foot down on the ground before swinging her good leg over and standing up grabbing the door frame, careful not to put any weight on the injured leg. He sort of shudders when he hears her open the door, but does not turn to look at her. This is really bad; if she cannot make him listen, there is no way she can get closer to him with the car door in her way, without potentially toppling over.

"Bruce – "

He turns to her then, and if she thought she had seen the worst of him that day already, she is in for a surprise. There is no trace of anger or hostility in his face, just an infinity of pain. He is still not looking at her, and she is struck by the thought that between the Bane betrayal and this, short of actually doing a Rachel and getting herself killed, she has probably hurt him more than any other woman if not any other person, save for the likes of Joe Chill and the Joker and Bane himself, in two very different ways but to a comparable degree of suffering. To say that he looks crushed would be an understatement.

She is about to stumble into a hasty and haphazard apology about how she never meant to insult Rachel's memory when he speaks in the quietest voice she has heard from him since before the hospital.

"What makes you think I feel any different about you _now_ than I did about her _then_? When I said _two women_ I meant the two _in the past_. The fact that I've been stupid enough not to make it clear to you doesn't mean that it's not true – " he looks at her _then_, and it is her cue to look away, not because she wants to but because all she can really do is try to squeeze her eyes shut against the flood of tears at his anguish and at the admission alike, which in the end achieves absolutely nothing because she is still standing there crying.

"Forgive me," is all she can think of saying; _sorry_ is perhaps too petty a word in this case. "I couldn't let you die," she adds helplessly, unable to think of anything else to say beyond the plain and pure truth.

She isn't exactly in a condition to mind her surroundings, or else she would have noticed that he has walked over to her side by then and it would not be such a surprise to end up with him holding her. She lets him get her back into the passenger seat but holds on to his hands, and is pleased, in spite of her otherwise distraught state, that he is still there, now sitting on the door step next to her; she is embarrassed about her crying fit but when she takes a closer look at him, before he hunkers down to press his face against her thigh above the cast, she notices that his eyes are every bit as red as hers must be.

"Stupid girl," he mutters against the flimsy fabric of her dress, a last-minute purchase by the nurse before sending her off, as there was no way she could fit her cast-encased leg into the tailored pantsuit. "What would I do with myself if you'd got yourself killed, what would be the point..." She does not want him to finish the sentence; in an attempt to distract him, she runs her fingers through his hair, strokes his cheek, and finally pulls him up and slides down in the seat until they are almost level.

"Guess what, I thought the same thing," she says shakily. "I need you alive. I need to go to sleep knowing you'll be alive when I wake up in the morning. I couldn't hear them talk about killing you and betray you again by doing nothing."

Of all the possible reactions, an eye roll is not, perhaps, the one she expected. "You more than made up for that when you came back for me in Gotham," he argues, quietly but persistently. This time he _is_ looking at her. "You didn't have to do it all over again."

Absolutely ridiculous. "I _did_ have to do it and I _will_ do it again as many times as it takes." Another of her stray thoughts on their fateful China trip slips back into her mind. "If what I have to do is save you from yourself, _that's_ what I'll be doing from now on and nothing you say will stop me."

She was wondering if this would make him argue with her, but what it does is make him chuckle. "I don't suppose you've had time to notice... but I'm not exactly a damsel in distress, you know."

She cannot help laughing; _touché_ indeed. But she does have a backup weapon up her sleeve. "And still, after your admittedly spectacular ass-kicking back there, that scumbag Xiao took you out with a rifle butt and they ended up beating you senseless."

He is rather indignantly, and absurdly, dismissive. "It was nothing worse than a few bruises." Conveniently forgetting what she has just told him about Wu's shooting order.

But he should know that she is no easy opponent. "Define _bruise_."

He unbuttons one of his shirt cuffs and rolls back the sleeve to expose a purple blotch. Ugly, but probably no worse than the one on her stomach. Still...

"Define _a few_."

"If you're looking for a pretext to get me to strip for you, you should wait until we're in a less public place," he retorts, smirking. She could probably try to continue this sparring match, but her brain has rather unhelpfully stopped working after the word _strip_. "I'm OK, really," he assures her.

She has recovered from the mental image enough to at least try to respond. "I don't ever want to watch you get beaten up again, do you hear me?" she insists, slipping both hands to the back of his neck to pull him closer.

And, oh blessed relief, the bastard kissed her, at last... but not for long, because apparently he foolishly wants to talk more than kiss. "You have – " another kiss; OK, so he _is_ giving in. "Unrealistic – expectations – " now he punctuates every word, or every other word, with brushing his lips over hers; what a cruel tease. "Of how much – I can improve – my fighting skills."

She pulls away from him just far enough to attempt to skewer him with a critical stare. "Your fighting's fine," she insists. "It's not your fighting skills but your _self-preservation_ skills that you need to work on. I mean, you trusted _me_ to take you to Bane after I'd just helped him steal a few billion from you; how much more reckless can you get –"

He starts shaking his head as soon as the word _Bane_ leaves her lips, and never stops until he cuts in, as soon as she has paused to catch her breath. "Will you ever stop blaming yourself?" It is his turn to sound impatient, it seems. "You're forgetting that I was _actively seeking him out_. I would have followed any lead I got. If it hadn't happened to be you, it could have been anyone." He sounds unshakably convinced, and she remembers another argument two weeks ago where they held the exact opposite viewpoints.

"But it was _me_," she quotes his words back at him, remembering how he rushed to take the blame for Giacomo Varese's death.

Perhaps recognising the argument, he sidesteps rather than engaging her directly. "You said you wouldn't apologise for that." He injects an excessive amount of reproach into both his voice and the look he gives her. "And I meant it when I said it wouldn't suit you."

"I'm not apologising," she says gloomily. Technically, she isn't.

Her miserable face makes him instantly give in. "All right; if I say I forgive you a thousand times over, will it make you feel better?" Maybe, or maybe not; but the way he is saying it right against her lips surely helps.

"For Bane, or for _this_?" she questions, wiggling her cast just enough so he knows what she is talking about.

He sits back, and she cannot quite tell how serious his next words are. "For Bane," he says in a level voice. "I still need to think about _this_. You scared me to death back there," he continues, quietly. "Not many people can claim that achievement."

"You survived," she argues. Not least thanks to her intervention, but she won't rub it in now.

"Barely," he counters, with enough of a hint of a grin to assure her that she is, indeed, mostly forgiven. Instead of trying to pull him to her, this time she leans forward in the seat to kiss him; at the rate they are going, it'll probably get dark before they make it to Lugano, even if it is about lunchtime now. But as ever, his comfort-seeking practical approach gets in the way.

"Let's get out of here and go home," he mutters after one final kiss. Granted, the emergency lane of a highway is neither the most romantic nor the most convenient place for a heavy duty makeout session, but well, it _is_ a sort of emergency.

"OK," she pretends to agree. Still, when he gets into the driver's seat to find out that she has swiped the key in the meantime, he does not seem at all upset.

.

Before you condemn Bruce for an utter ass for avoiding her in hospital and then being tough on her, I must say a few words in his defence. The key words are _you scared me to death_; this is typical PTSD behaviour, and we know he has had PTSD three times over already, first with bats, then with his parents' death, and finally with Rachel, so a fourth time would be plausible and no fun at all. In particular, it makes the sufferer anxious to avoid the cause of suffering, be it a situation or a person, no matter how otherwise dear (I should know, I've had it). He is lucky, of course, that this time his fear of losing a loved one did not materialise, but it still would take him _at least_ a few days to get over the worst of it. If anything, I made him get over it in record time.

As a minor side note, you won't see me having them declare the _I love you_'s explicitly in as many words. I humbly accept the rotten vegetables. Sorry, personal quirk, I never do it. I assume that they understand it from what I have them otherwise say and do, and say it in bed offscreen, as it were.

My main narrative is told, as of the end of this chapter; and if I were a real writer I would have stopped here. But I would not be a fangirl worth my Christian Bale DVD collection if I did not also enjoy occasional bits of fan service in the guise of tying up loose ends (well, _Nolan_ did it ;) ) Hence the final three chapters after this one that will follow shortly...ish. Think of them as fluffy icing on the cake, or perhaps more appropriately, the bow on top of the box ;)


	21. Sleepless in Lugano

I wrote this and the next chapter as one, but when I hit 6,000+ words, I knew I was going to split it. I kind of prefer a 24-chapter total to a 23-chapter total, anyway. This means that there still will be one left after the three I am posting today.

.

The worst thing about having a leg broken in two places isn't having wires and pins around the kneecap holding it together and a metal plate and screws in her ankle; after the first few days of painkillers, she does not often feel pain now. It is not even being unable to bend her knee or move her leg at all below the right hip for now; the original one-piece cast bothered her, true, but by the time they got to Lugano, Lucius had sent her a pair of titanium crutches and separate carbon fibre splints for the ankle and knee that lock securely in place but are lightweight and adjustable to take into account the subsiding swelling, and as soon as the doctor replaced the cast with these, life became easier and she started learning to move, or at least hobble, around. The worst thing, she now knows, is getting to sleep in a king-size bed alone.

It is not that Bruce stays out of bed to keep his distance; after their rollercoaster of a conversation on the way back, he has been unfailingly thoughtful and caring, thinking ten steps ahead about what she might want or need and doing his best to anticipate her every request and make her life less uncomfortable, and treating the requests she makes explicitly as an uncontested priority… when he is around. Which, as it happens, is not a lot. It seems that every other day he has to go to Rome or Lyon or somewhere else a short flight away but far enough to keep him away for hours, leaving her to the kind but unexciting care of the housemaid who he is now paying extra for extended hours. The fallout from the Tessuti Varese affair has brought a deluge of demands on his time, from the Italian, Chinese and Interpol authorities who are still investigating the events, from existing clients and partners who were put on the back burner while he and Theo were up to their ears in dealing with _Chinese boxes_, and from newly interested parties who are now circling the company with offers and orders. She mostly stays upstairs, between the bedroom and the terrace; there is no way she'd try going down the stairs on crutches even if he'd let her, and while he is happy to carry her there, she is less than happy with what it may do to his back if repeated too often. He has set out a new rattan couch and a swing seat and a big canvas umbrella on the terrace for her to sit on, and under, during the day, has shown her how to monitor the gate camera on the bedroom TV screen, and has clamped down on his aversion in favour of safety and given her a gun to keep by her side when he is not there, asking to _please not shoot to kill _if it can be helped.

To his further credit, when in Lugano he has been trying to handle as much business from the villa as he can, leaving Theo to hold the fort at the company office, but there are still daily meetings that require his attendance and stacks of documents that need to be read, reviewed, and answered, and endless phone calls that keep his ear glued to the phone even when he is around. She has done her best to keep herself busy too, fashioning herself a library from among the books – mostly textbooks – she found in the study and spends her days highlighting pages of financial and technical texts, unlikely but unexpectedly interesting reading, though she is glad that she is doing it as an optional pursuit. By the end of their second day back in Lugano, seeing her wistful look every time he walked over to her asking if she needed anything, he gave up and pushed the study couch over against the bedroom wall opposite the bed, put the large coffee table from downstairs next to it, and set up camp in this improvised office where he can be near her regardless of whether she is indoors or outdoors, working on the couch.

Trouble is, he now also _sleeps_ on it. Most of the time it isn't even intentional; he is so tired by the end of each day that he just falls asleep reading documents, often with his head resting awkwardly on top of a stack of paper. Once or twice when he stayed awake, he sat next to her on the bed for a few minutes, then kissed her good night and walked back to his perch when she seemed sleepy enough to be drifting off, he unaware that it stirred her wide awake again and she too embarrassed at herself to admit it. The obvious reason is to leave her maximum space in bed and avoid accidentally bumping or putting pressure on her leg, but after three or four days of this, she wonders if there is such a thing as being too careful.

xxx

She is sure that it must be past midnight already; he fell asleep sometimes around eleven and she has been half-sitting in bed, propped up against a cushion and surrounded by a landscape of assorted pillows, staring into the darkness. She should have at least told him to fetch her night vision goggles from downstairs; that way she could watch him sleep in lieu of entertainment. The couple of times that he fell asleep with the lights on, she was reluctant to turn them off, sitting there watching his face, the peaceful expression wiping years off his age to make him look almost like a teen. She wonders if she could wear the goggles to read; it would probably be too much hassle. But after another half hour or so, she has had it. Either she is going to spend a miserable sleepless night, or she will make a needy fool of herself by waking him up and asking him to come over, or she needs something to keep her occupied. After all, he does not seem to have any trouble sleeping with the lights on. She slides the dimmer switch for the bedside light just enough for a dim glow, picks up her latest reading – a navigation manual so that they can later take turns steering the Falcon in Liguria if need be – and tries to memorise the rules.

She is not sure when exactly he woke up; one minute he is there with his eyes closed and that curiously angelic expression, the next she looks up from the page to see him looking at her in something between confusion and worry.

"Anything wrong?"

She shakes her head. "Nope. Just reading."

"Leg bothering you? Shall I bring you water for the painkiller?"

"I'm OK, really. Woke up, that's all." She still does not want to admit that she was never asleep in the first place, let alone why.

"Is there anything I can do?"

Get into this bed, now, and not get out again until morning. But thinking it and saying it apparently require varying degrees of resolve. She'd have no trouble saying it, really; it's hearing his worried protestations about not troubling her with the leg that she'd rather not deal with.

"No, I'll just keep reading for a bit, if the light doesn't bother you."

Whether from guessing her thoughts or from a similar wish or from common sense finally prevailing, he takes it as a cue to get up, walk over, and sit down next to her, craning his neck to peek at the book.

"Planning to become a sea captain?"

She smirks. "Planning to do my share of steering that obscene boat of yours. Unless you'd rather have me sitting in the hot tub while you're doing all the work."

His expression at hearing this is best described as _playful_. "Don't know about you, but my tentative plans for what we'd be doing back on the boat didn't feature long voyages."

Nice to hear that; she may have scared him off the bed for now, but it is good to know that the condition is not permanent. "We should probably steer it out of the harbour, though. For _your_ sake, mind you." For all his prowess in private that gives a new meaning to the term _uninhibited_, and for all his famously relaxed attitude to public displays of a quasi-sexual nature in his Gotham days, she was thrilled to discover that he was both self-conscious about and very turned on by anything approximating the real thing outside of the house; in the latest instance, she followed up her theft of the car keys on the highway lay-by on the way back to Lugano by successfully reducing him to a state of helpless mewling against her shoulder with a simple handjob, with the _de facto_ public setting driving him so far out of his mind that it took him almost a quarter of an hour to stir from his spaced-out state and another five minutes before he could even think of starting the engine. It would be a shame not to exploit it, but Portofino harbour is too small and, worse, full of regulars.

He probably gets both the same memory, if his half-closed eyes are any indication, and the same conclusion. "Good point. I'd probably manage to steer it on my own, but it will be nice to have company on the bridge."

"_Company_ would be dangerous," she counters. "Can you imagine what sort of damage we could do if we get distracted? I say we take turns. But I agree in principle that we keep actual travel to a minimum." She tries to go back to reading the manual, but it is tricky to balance the conflicting priorities of keeping the book upright and keeping his arm where it is around her shoulder. Which it does not take him long to notice.

"I could read it for you if you want."

The offer makes her grin. It is tempting for sure, but while it may – or may not – help her get to sleep, it would completely defeat the object of learning anything from the manual; all she would do is listen to the voice. "No, it's OK. Could you hold it for me?"

"Sure." He punctuates his consent with a kiss against her ear that threatens to shut down any brain cells that may be needed for reading. "Just tell me when you want me to turn the pages."

For a few paragraphs, she manages to maintain her concentration; but the effect of him back in bed next to her is to get her too relaxed to care about reading on, so much so that after two mumbled page-turning requests, she feels her eyes slip closed halfway down the fifth page.

xxx

She does not so much wake up as a discrete event; rather, she slowly drifts awake. It is still dark; he is still sitting next to her; and it seems that he is still awake as well. Which would have worried her if the way he is holding her did not feel too damn nice. He still has his arm around her shoulders, but has now turned to her kind of sideways, with his face buried in her hair; she would have thought he was asleep if it weren't for his other hand stroking her arm, from shoulder to wrist; though _stroking_ is perhaps too strong a word for what is really just running his fingertips over her skin, so lightly she can barely feel the touch, as if she were made of finest glass instead of flesh and would shatter at the slightest hint of pressure, all the pent-up tenderness he does not want, or dare, to show when she is awake coaxed from him when he thinks she is sleeping. She is still not sure she likes the idea that he may have sat awake next to her all this time, but the sensation is too delicious for the thought to linger; all she can do is pretend to still be asleep so that he keeps on doing it. A memory comes into focus, distantly but distinctly; the Italian nurse in Florence raving about her boyfriend who _holds her like that_, that same girl having told her earlier that he was there, in the hospital, the night after she arrived; he must have kept vigil by her side while she was out on medication. _Che la tiene così_, indeed; the girl knew what she was talking about, after all.

Still, it turns out that pretending to be asleep is not as easy as she might think, as a particularly light caress makes her shiver and stir, and thus blows her cover.

"You're awake," he observes, in a quiet but very _awake_ voice himself.

The words send her back to the first insane night they spent at the villa, the morning - almost afternoon – after, when she woke up and did not initially notice him watching her. "That depends on whether you're real," she says his old quip back at him, and is rewarded with a kiss on the cheek – not of the San Giovanni hospital variety but of a much more electrifying kind.

"Real enough?"

"Seems like it." She stretches on the cushions, tired of her half-sitting pose, and tries to slide down to a more horizontal position, but the problem is that it makes him instantly shift away; he might not be getting out of it but he seems determined to stay as close to the edge of the bed as is humanly possible. Well, after catching him being really _sweet_ to her a minute ago – there is no other way of describing it – she is not about to play coy anymore. "Don't go away… please," she entreats him, reaching out to pull him back to her, and this time he forgets about the splint-related arguments and just does as she asks him.

.

_Apologies in advance for the endless ramble that follows; I would have replied by PM if I could! _

_To the guest reviewer who commented on Ch 20 Selina being relatively OOC: I largely agree with your observation – in fact, she *was* relatively OOC at that point within the context of the fic. This caught her at a vulnerable moment, both physically, being hurt and on painkillers, and mentally (which applies to both of them; they each had just been through one of their very worst nightmares, he thought he saw her die, and she thought she saw him about to be killed. It is the *expression* of their trauma that was different, with him regressing into PTSD-fuelled anger and her dipping into relative neediness). So there was an intentional element to the OOC-ness…or else, being their usual guarded selves, neither of them would have confessed what they really feel for each other._

_Plus she did not realise that he was hurt by what he had (accurately) read as her implying that she was second best to Rachel (which, for the record, he disagreed with as coherently as he could when he could trust himself to talk again: the reason he was so hurt by her words in the first place is that he saw that she (wrongly) thought him to be less-than-completely in love with her) – instead she imagined that he was offended "on Rachel's behalf"._

_This ties in with my overall (probably questionable) reading of their interaction in the film post-Bane. It seemed that Selina was more personally invested in him than he in her after that moment. The telling scene to me is when he gives her the CleanSlate; he appeals to her better self and asks for her help but is certainly no starry-eyed suitor; she talks tough but looks and acts much more vulnerable than her words suggest. Then she begs him to escape with her, then comes back for him, kills Bane, stays in a likely-doomed city, and kisses him with no ulterior motive (unlike the first kiss when she stole the tag for the Aventador keys). For all practical purposes, it seems like post-Bane TDKR Selina is clearly into him, while he has other things to worry about._

_I took it from there; apart from my giving him an assortment of injuries that made him less than convinced that he is not too much of a has-been, not to mention bad luck, for her, there is the fact that as a more or less typical guy, he does not present his feelings on a plate and we only see his behaviour through her eyes – perceptive as she is, she can't always read his mind (viz. the Rachel exchange). And, unlike him with his Rachel history (which he is over now, but something that had him messed up for eight years is bound to have after-effects) that taught him to suppress his feelings, the way I set it up here was to suggest early on that she had grown out of romantic love stories in her teens and used men cool-headedly ever since, so when she fell for him, or acknowledged it by the time they were in China, it hit her full force, like a pendulum swing. Not to mention that she had believed him dead twice while he had always known, or at least expected her to have survived. In the end, I take them both to be interested and ultimately in love, but rightly or wrongly I make it *less ambiguous* in her case, unless you count his jealousy as a giveaway._

_That said, all this is nothing more than my interpretation. I make absolutely no claims to a 100% accurate Selina portrayal; from a quick look, I've seen a few that seemed far superior to mine, and I hope to eventually, finally, get around to reading and commenting on those when I am done writing._


	22. Back to the future

xxx

"Can I speak to Miss Selina Kyle, please?" The crisp English voice at the other end of the call is fully in line with the 44 phone caller ID, but try as she may, she cannot remember knowing any Englishmen who might have this number, or remember her by that name.

"Speaking," she says, cagily.

"Hello Selina, Alfred Pennyworth here." She is both relieved and genuinely happy to hear the name. "Am I interrupting anything?"

"Nothing at all," she assures him. In fact, there is nothing to interrupt; she is alone upstairs, Bruce is away again, and the maid is busying herself with the downstairs floors. "It's good to hear you."

"Lucius Fox gave me your number," Alfred offers by way of explanation, as if it were needed. "And he told me what happened to you lot." His voice takes on a stern note. "That's really not the way to behave, young lady. I hope his abominable self-destructive habits don't rub off on you."

She has to laugh at that, even if it risks keeping Alfred cross. "I'm doing my best to resist," she says.

"Not very successfully, it seems," Alfred points out, but his voice sounds warmer again. "What's all that sorry business about your leg being broken in two places?"

Who would have thought that Lucius was such a gossip? "I had to jump a dozen feet down to stop a thug from shooting, or else he'd blow up the room we were in." She wonders if Alfred knows that part already, but it won't hurt to assure him that her bone-breaking feat was not entirely self-destructive after all. "And I'm much better now."

"What's the damage?" Alfred's voice turns almost professional.

"Fractured kneecap, fractured ankle, they've put screws and the like into both, but they say they'll take them out of the knee in a few weeks. The ones in the ankle might stay."

Alfred clicks his tongue in a mixture of sympathy and disapproval. "In my old line of work at the SBS," he remarks matter-of-factly, "we'd technically refer to the kind of situation you're currently in as _a royal bitch_." She has to laugh. "I can only hope your reckless boyfriend is taking good care of you."

"He is," she insists.

"Good." Alfred takes it in stride, as the least that he would apparently expect of his former charge. "And I know you're taking care of _him_, but I also want you to take care of _yourself_. For _his_ sake, if you won't be convinced by other reasons. I don't want to have to worry about you _both_ now."

"I will, I promise." She does her best to sound both convinced and convincing. "I have no plans to let either of us get killed anytime soon," she adds for greater emphasis.

"Better if it's _never_," Alfred counters, and she has to admit that he has a point.

"Can I persuade you to come visit us here?" She knows that Alfred wanted himself and Bruce to keep their distance at least for a while, but she knows that Alfred is really family, and it would be a shame for those two to stay apart for good.

"Thank you, my dear, I'll think about it. I have to go visit a friend in the French Alps in late September, I might just take a detour. But before then, you must come visit me here. When are you out of the splints and off crutches?"

"Early to mid-August, they say. It may depend but they've done a good job realigning the bones."

"Good to know. Well, whenever you're ready, just give me a call. I mostly stay at home in Cornwall now, but I also have a nice summer cottage in the Lake District. It's a walker's paradise, shame about your leg but we can still go riding."

"We'll be happy to come over." She finds herself looking forward to it already.

"Oh no, I meant _you_, not _him_," Alfred points out. "If that boy tags along he'll only want to talk about technology and his latest toys and the silly sports he's now into. I'm nearly eighty now, I don't want to spend hours talking about surveillance systems and BASE-lining. I'd rather just gossip," he says in a vaguely conspiratorial tone.

"It's a deal." She wonders if Bruce will be sulking about it, but a promise is a promise. "But you must come see us in September, or else he'll never get over it," she adds.

"I will. Don't tell him yet, but I will. And as I said, take care of yourself."

"Will do. And Alfred?"

"Yes?"

"Please stay in touch."

"I sure will. And you do the same, young lady. You have my number now."

xxx

It is shaping up to be an afternoon of surprises, as an hour after Alfred's call, she gets another call, a local one this time, from Theo's wife. They have not met yet, but she has heard enough of Sylvie to know her for a down-to-earth sort of girl who does an excellent job juggling part-time work and two unruly kids and apparently also manages to keep her husband from doing too many crazy things, a skill Selina would like to know more about. Sylvie is asking if she can stop by, and half an hour after the call, she duly does so. Knowing that she is only three or four years younger than her husband, Selina is surprised to see the petite brown-haired woman looking like a twentysomething.

The purpose of Sylvie's visit is apparently to bring Selina a get-well present from her boss. They saw each other very briefly when she and Bruce stopped by on the way back from Italy to pick up the phones and the keys to the villa, and trade in Theo's camouflaged-weapon Scénic for the Sesto, but it did not leave much time beyond expressions of dismay and sympathy on his part, interspersed with stern comments about careless company owners endangering their best staff. Sylvie runs off almost at once, having to go back to the two _rascals_, as she lovingly calls them, waiting in the car to be taken to sports practice classes, though she has promised to come check on her again. Once she is alone, Selina unwraps the golden paper and regards the big, similarly golden box in a mixture of delight and chagrin.

The box is an exquisite collection of Godiva chocolates, 2 ¼ pounds of sinfully good stuff; she can practically smell them through the plastic wrap. She wishes someone would lock them up away from her and hand her one or two at a time over the space of a fortnight, or even a month; knowing herself, left alone with this temptation she will go through the 84 pieces in a week – and with Bruce having banned her from the exercise room so long as she is in splints, good luck to herself not showing the weight gain.

Luckily, the temptation has a distraction attached, in the shape of a get-well card on top of the box under the wrapping that, when opened, reveals an Italian inscription in Theo's handwriting: _Un ottimo lavoro ma ti prego di smetterlo. _Brilliant work, please don't do it again; she might argue that repeat performances may be made necessary by events beyond her control, but understands the sentiment. Also inside the card is a folded page from the _Corriere_ from a few days ago; she has not been keeping an eye on the news, and is now curious and mildly worried to see what the media made of their misadventure.

The front page has a teaser halfway down the right hand side: _Anti-terrorist raid in Prato, _with a short paragraph below and a note referring to the next page for details. The second page boasts a much more substantial effort, taking up a quarter of the space and accompanied by a picture of a beaming, shorter-haired Gianfranco sitting in a hospital bed photographed in the middle of an official handshake with a high-ranking Carabinieri officer, with a slim blonde girl – looks like the real Chiara – sitting on the other side of the bed. Unlike Bruce, Gianfranco looks better with shorter hair, less _pretty_ and more handsome, she thinks. The feature is titled _Daring Carabinieri mission puts an end to a biological weapons factory west of Prato _and contains a glowing description of the events. _In an unprecedented lightning-fast targeted raid_, it goes, _the Carabinieri ROS yesterday stormed the premises of a textiles factory in Prato, uncovering a sinister Chinese mafia operation producing a nerve toxin that was smuggled into Syria and also sold to a number of terrorist groups concealed inside rolls of fabric. The company had been effectively taken hostage by the local branch of the Triad, who, as it transpired, had murdered its owner, Giacomo Varese, a respected local businessman, two weeks ago. The raid was made possible thanks to China's participation in the Interpol effort that helped trace Triad links with terrorists and obtain data on Wu Ming, the Triad boss who ran the Prato facility, which also led to a series of raids and arrests in mainland China, and thanks to the meticulous preparation and daring undercover work by two freelance agents in Italy, who cannot be named for operational reasons._ She snorts at the _freelance agents_ part and remembers Bruce complaining about the journalists to her at the hospital, saying how he had to beg the police and others to keep their faces and names out of the media. Good to know it worked. _However_, the article goes on, _Mr Varese's son Gianfranco, who has inherited the company and now intends to turn it around, and who cooperated in the raid, speaking from his room at Santa Maria Novella hospital where he is recovering from bone fractures, described the pair of intrepid operatives respectively as "half 007, half Superman" and "half Audrey Hepburn, half Mata Hari"_. Oh well, she could live with those descriptions; they are more amusing than revealing, after all.

xxx

"What, tired of boxes?" Bruce asks her when she points to Theo's gift sitting on the nightstand with a long-suffering sigh. Her willpower lasted for half an hour – and now, another hour and eight chocolate pieces later, she has to revise her rate of uncontrolled consumption of the contents from a week to three days max.

"Actually, this is a kind of box I _do_ like," she counters. "I just wish he'd got me a smaller one." She notices his curious look and tries to explain. "There's a kilo of chocolate in it. Was, before I got started, and at this rate and so long as you won't let me exercise, I'll get so heavy I'll ruin the mattress."

His expression makes abundantly clear what he thinks of the likelihood of that happening, but he still tries to reassure her. Well, sort of. "We'll think of something," he offers with a suggestive wink.

"You already did," she pretends to be less than happy about it. "And at _that_ rate we'll not just ruin the mattress, we'll break the bed frame." Which is probably not true, but he should not begrudge her a bit of artistic license; what the _exercise_ he has in mind may lack in exertion, it makes up for in intensity. Since he left the couch to share the bed as usual, his nice gesture of holding her so she can get to sleep, more often than not, ends up with both of them getting much _less_ sleep; and if she thought that the condition of her leg would baffle him in the least, she was thinking of the wrong lover. Except that instead of the usual passionate antics, he now drives her crazy by being slow and careful, a ruthless, relentless, shameless tease,mercilessly tender and obscenely good at playing with her body, so much so that she is happy that the village residents are some distance away, or they'd think their Lamborghini-driving neighbour has acquired a wildcat in heat, what with the way it makes her moan. Worse yet, she thought she'd never in her life stoop to saying something as trite as _I want you to fuck me senseless_, but couldn't help it on at least one occasion; she would be embarrassed if the consequences had not fully justified the plea. She has been doing her best to reciprocate and he is happy to submit to her caresses, but she cannot wait until she is in good enough shape to have him entirely at _her_ tender mercy for a change... not to mention making the most of his endearing hang-up about sex in public places that also gets him ridiculously turned on.

"We'll think of _more_ something," he counters in the meantime, undaunted.

"Have pity on a poor cripple," she teasingly throws his words from weeks ago back at him.

He doesn't miss a beat. "You've survived."

Nor does she, naturally. "Barely," she shoots back, grinning, before adding, "but I'm getting the hang of it."

xxx

It turns out that the threat of decimating the chocolate box that evening has been averted thanks to Bruce, who called the San Salvatore restaurant on his way back from the meeting and stopped by later to pick up a takeaway dinner. She cannot imagine how he could have remembered her exact order from two months ago, but somehow he did; and she has to laugh at his apologetic expression when he says that the _affogato_ dessert would have melted en route if he had tried to bring her one.

"No worries," she reassures him when they are sitting on the terrace having a home-served version of the fateful dinner. "I'm sure I'll have a chance to eat it again. I'd like to go back there when I'm walking again. I really liked the food, I loved the view, and all in all I'd like to give it another chance."

"What was wrong with the first time?" he asks her, perplexed.

Not much, considering the way things turned out. Still..."Too much unresolved sexual tension," she offers with a dirty look. Plus the fact that he did his best to confuse her with the truth.

"Isn't that the point of dinner dates?" he shoots back, innocently.

"I prefer the _after-_dinner dates," she replies with a meaningful look, taking in his indecently wide grin. Looks like he does, too.

He is only too happy to confirm her guess. "Couldn't agree more. Still, I should buy it, and I keep forgetting to call the owners."

"You sure?" Not that she wants to count his money, but still.

"Positive," he replies, and reinforces his point by enumerating the arguments. "I have no plans to move away from this place, and I hope you don't mind it here. We need a good place nearby to go for dinner, at least in the eight months of the year the cable railway is open. I know Graziella doesn't mind cooking, but I don't feel like regularly bothering her with it, and besides, she normally only comes in twice a week. And I don't cook and to my knowledge, neither do you."

"I usually had dinner bought for me by marks," she says in her questionable defence.

"_I _never bought you one until Lugano," he counters.

"You were never a mark," she argues in turn.

"How about the time you got to my Diebold?" he points out, and if she had any doubts if there was any hint of a grudge, the grin accompanying it is reassurance plenty. Still, she has to make her point.

"_That_ was a mistake."

"I'm glad you made it." She wonders if anyone ever could look so happy about having been relieved, albeit temporarily, of a few billion dollars and an expensive necklace. "Which reminds me," he continues, getting up to walk inside. When he comes back, he is holding a very familiar black velvet square. "I had to have half a dozen or so of them replaced that were damaged by the solvent," he explains, opening the box for her to see. To her eye, the beads all look exactly the way they did. "but most of them are the original ones."

"Is the tracker still in there?" she asks, pointing to the clasp.

"It is. But I can take it out if you want – "

She does not let him finish. "No, I want it there." In fact, considering what has happened, she wouldn't have it any other way. "Besides, it's not as if I were going anywhere now." She meant it literally, as an allusion to her lame state; they have had to postpone their trips to Japan and Vietnam already... but when she has said it, she realises the double entendre. Oh well, it's true anyway.

Judging by how pleased he looks to hear it, he only cares about the second meaning. "We could still go to Venice in a couple of weeks," he suggests.

"Would be a shame to be there on crutches," she counters, idly playing with the pearls.

"You won't want to walk around there in any case," he replies. "Starting from early July, it's even fuller of tourists than usual. We can go back and walk around next spring, but for now our best bet would be to get a powerboat..."

"...and crash it," she cuts in, sarcastically.

He does his best to look offended. "This is absolutely unfair. In the past two months, you've seen me handle _two_ motor boats, two planes, a helicopter, at least four cars, and a bike; and I haven't crashed any of those, not once. Are you still going to hold a single aircraft crash half a year ago against me, and an intentional one to boot?"

Well, it almost killed you, _tesoro_. "It's the quality, not the quantity of crashes that counts."

He pretends to be exasperated. "OK, we'll hire a gondola and crawl around like tacky tourists."

"Think of the upside," she suggests. "The important thing is that you won't need to steer it, so we'll both be free to do… other things."

"At that rate," he argues, not unreasonably, "we may not need a boat at all, just a big bed. Compared to gondolas, beds have less of a chance of capsizing."

She has to admit, the idea has its appeal. "Sounds pretty good to me."

"It's settled then. We'll keep boats to a minimum in Venice, and then we can go back to the Falcon after that. Ever been to Capri?"

"No."

"That'll be the first place we go then, when you're allowed to take off the splints. And then when your leg is healed, about late August or early September I hope, I'll get _my_ knee cartilage replaced so we can take turns hobbling around. I need to get it done in time for the skiing season."

"Getting new cartilage doesn't mean you have to immediately lose it again," she admonishes him.

"I'm not that bad a skier, actually," he counters. That's the trouble, she thinks. "Besides," he continues, "it's really time I showed the brat a thing or two."

Ah, so there is a battle of vanities involved. "Which brat?"

"Max."

She has no idea who Max is. "Do I know him?"

"Fortunately, not yet, but I suspect it's a matter of time. Max Reimann, Theo's precious nephew."

"The crazy 25-year-old?"

"It runs in the family," Bruce retorts, making her wonder what exactly he and Theo have been up to in the office these days. "And he's 26 now."

"That's still twelve years younger."

"Precisely, and the little shit has no respect for experience. He's been rattling on about the heli-skiing in Zermatt for months. Simply won't shut up about how he allegedly wiped the floor with everyone else there last winter. It's time I showed him how it's _really _done."

"You can do it next winter, why hurry now?"

"He's off to Gotham after that," Bruce responds sourly. "He was supposed to do a PhD at Oxford in hypersonic propulsion and go work at Reaction Engines while he's doing it, and stay there afterwards. Now he wants to do it at Gotham University and go to Wayne Enterprises instead. Worst of all, Theo has already talked to Lucius about it, and Lucius loves the idea."

"What's wrong with it?"

"Poaching talent, that's what's wrong. Max may be a brat but he _is_ smart, and I'd rather have him working for me – "

"He'll be working for you in either case," she reminds him.

"It's not the same," Bruce argues. "Wayne is the company my family built that I inherited, this one is a company I picked up when it was really very average, that Theo built with my help and we are now running together. It may be smaller but it's up to us to keep it growing."

She can see the point in that. What she _cannot_ see the point in is dashing off heli-skiing right after a knee operation.

"I'm sure Max will be back in Switzerland next winter for holidays and such, and you can upstage him then," she insists. "Or you can beat him at BASE jumping instead," she suggests. For some people, that is the _safer_ alternative.

"That would be too easy," he counters.

Hopeless. "Not enough titanium around your bones yet?" she tries needling him.

"Look who's talking," he replies, lightning-fast. Bastard.

"Fine," she sighs in exhausted defeat. "On one condition."

"No way," he snaps. "_I_'ll go skiing, _you_'ll be sitting in a hot tub waiting for me."

Great. He'll be turning the heads of every girl on the slopes, and she...

"OK, it's a deal. And I know just the bikini I'll be wearing in and around that hot tub. We'll see which of us is more popular..."

The glare is impressive, but the voice resigned. "You win. We go together..."

"...and stick to the red slopes."

He says nothing but looks miserable. She suspects that it is a lost cause and that come skiing season, he'll be up there doing the craziest stunts with or without the benefit of the cartilage, but all things considered and despite his recklessness being a pain, it is good to have left the past in the past and to be thinking of the future once more.

.

I meant to mention it before; I made a deliberate choice to stick to Nolan's imagery of the pearl necklace spilling despite the fact that expensive necklaces are in reality knotted between beads to stop precisely that from happening. But since he had it in Batman Begins, it was too tempting to include. Pearls are, indeed, easily damaged by chemicals.

BASE-lining is a recent variation on BASE jumping invented by a bunch of French guys: (http www) telegraph*co*uk/travel/activityandadventure/9581487/The-pioneers-of-BASE-lining*html#?frame=2357446

And while I am on the subject of Telegraph slideshows, here is a great, if late, one of Hong Kong bars: (http www) telegraph*co*uk/travel/ultratravel/9602964/Hong-Kongs-best-rooftop-bars*html#?frame=2367138 It really belongs in Catching Up, but they published it in October after I'd finished posting it.

And here is a link to the Godiva Ultimate Collection box that I mention (if you like chocolate and haven't tried Godiva, get yourself a sampler box of truffles, or just a few loose ones… but I am not responsible for its habit-forming properties): (http) godiva*com/GODIVA%20Ultimate%20Collection/73422,default,pd*html?cgid=Limited-Edition#start=3


	23. Symmetric warfare

xxx

"_Ma vaffa'n culo._" He sounds very authentically Italian saying it, too. It was an interesting juncture for her to wake up from her next day's afternoon nap to, and lying on the bed, she tries to strain her ears to hear the rest of the conversation that he is conducting by phone on the terrace.

"They're nuts," he continues, in English this time. "I'm not its Chairman but it _is_ my company, for fuck's sake, do something. Tell them we're nearly bankrupt, five hundred million in overdue debt, and our production lines are twenty years old and malfunctioning. Tell them I'm a royal pain, completely reckless, and morbidly paranoid. What do you mean, _it's true_? I'm _not_ letting an industrial giant buy up my business. I don't care how much they're raving about our drones. I don't care that we use their parts that could be marketed directly. Tell them I'll give them a good price on the finished items... OK, we'll sign exclusive long term supply contracts for their main market," he continues in a more resigned voice, "but we keep existing and new regional ones as direct suppliers. Maybe we'll draft a framework partnership agreement. And I'll want some concessions, too. I want to make those chip things under license for the European market, we've got spare capacity at our Malaysian plant and could make them there... _What?_" He sounds genuinely appalled. "No, just no. I'm not going to be within _100 miles_ of that meeting. No, not even if you offer me the jet to fly there. I'm fucking _dead_. I have a _tombstone_. You can give them the terms on our behalf." He ends the call and staggers into the bedroom to plunk himself down on the couch, still fuming.

"Poor Theo," Selina offers by way of a greeting. She can only assume that the man is the only likely candidate for discussing the tactics of fighting a takeover threat with.

As it turns out, she is mistaken.

"_A_, Theo isn't poor, not with what I'm paying him, and _b_, it wasn't him," he replies gloomily.

Her response is to make big, round eyes at him.

"It was Lucius," he explains.

"_What?_" This time it is her turn to be shocked, and this time her eyes get bigger and rounder of their own accord.

He makes a face. "Lucius was telling me that the Wayne Enterprises CFO and Chief Operating Officer had just come to him and presented a business case and a detailed set of proposals for buying up Wainwright Security. _Ma vaffa… _and guess what line they were using? _That's what Bruce Wayne would have wanted._ Citing _European synergies_ and _global integration_ and so on. For fuck's sake." He shakes his head in disgust. "And Lucius didn't immediately shoot it down because he says he wanted to check with me. I suspect he may have _liked_ the idea. He was offering to let me fly the hypersonic to Gotham to discuss it, he knows how much I want to fly that thing and he's trying to use it as leverage. But if he thinks I'm going to stand by and let my company be bought by… my... _other_ company... What are you laughing at?" he looks up at hearing her snicker. Much as she can sympathise with his conflict of corporate loyalty, she cannot help finding it amusing.

"Sorry," she says, rather unhelpfully. "You have to admit, not many people have this kind of problem. But what do you mean about not being Chairman?"

"I meant I'm no longer Chairman of Wayne," he explains. "Wainwright isn't a public company and as such never had a Board, so rather than being Chairman I am and intend to remain the sole tyrant owner, as Theodore Reimann is forgetting at his peril," he finishes darkly.

So her guess the other day was right; they did lock horns over _something_. "What's the deal between you two now?"

It is his cue to get even more exasperated.

"_Im. Fucking. Possible_." He shakes his head again for emphasis. "I _knew_ it would happen. I _knew_ I had to keep quiet about it, or my life would become a living hell. I know you had no choice but to call him and tell him to call Lucius," he adds quickly, "but _crap_ I wish it had never come to this."

"What, is he threatening to expose you?" she wonders, unlikely as the scenario seems to her.

"No way, he's having too much fun _not_ exposing me," Bruce moans. "But it's almost worse. You know what the bastard's doing now? As soon as he found out that I was Wayne in my other life, he immediately figured out the Batman part, just like I thought, and has since then _suddenly discovered_ the phenomenon of the dead Gotham vigilante and has become Batman's biggest fan. Publicly, mind you. He doesn't say anything one-on-one except that he now won't address me other than _Bruce_ in private, says it's either that or _Brandy_. But in public he keeps dragging up references to Gotham's crime-fighting legend in meetings and presentations where he knows I can't retaliate."

"I'd say it's sweet, really," she observes, trying desperately to keep a more or less serious face.

"Wait, it gets worse still," Bruce assures her grimly. "He's found out that there are Batman _comic books_ now. I am a _comic book hero_ for fuck's sake!" Good thing Bruce is too carried away by his indignant speech to notice her chewing the inside of her cheeks. "And he's framed up a few of them and put them on the wall in his office, like pictures, you'll see them when you get there, I bet he'll _never_ take them down now. You can't begin to imagine the embarrassment of sitting in client meetings opposite that wall, not knowing where to look. And if _that_ wasn't enough," he goes on forlornly, "he's counting down the days until that damn _Dark Hero_ film is released next year, and talks about who's playing whom, and says that he's going to see it and so should I. And to top it all," he concludes with another sigh, "he keeps referring to Batman _in Italian_. Of the two hundred countries I could have theoretically settled in, I chose the border between the _two_ countries where my former nickname literally translates into _L'Uomo Pipistrello_."

She may be famous for keeping a poker face, but it cannot stand up to this kind of test; she picks up a pillow and sits there shamelessly giggling into it, watching him as he rolls his eyes in defeat.

"I think," she ventures when she can trust herself not to start laughing mid-sentence, "that he's just thrilled to discover your secret identity."

"No, it's more like pissed off that it's taken him so long," Bruce corrects her. "He can't believe I've successfully bullshitted him for eight years, and then for four more months in person. The one time he commented on it, he said he'd never thought about it because it would have been too batshit crazy to contemplate." This seems to try his own restraint enough to get him snickering. "But talking about being thrilled at discovering secret identities, the office should be thrilled to discover _his_ identity tomorrow."

"Meaning...?" she prompts him, intrigued.

"He left early today for an off-site meeting, and I sent his assistant away and I have the code to the vault where he keeps a spare key to his office. So I made good use of my time replacing the name plate on his office door and all the business cards in his desktop card holder to say _T. Florian Reimann _instead of _Theodore_. I'm not the only one with a secret identity hangup, and it's time I showed him a thing or two about symmetric warfare."

She recalls their first meeting and Theo looking less than pleased at the mention of his romantic-sounding middle name. "Kids," she remarks nonchalantly, dissembling her amusement.

"Well, _exactly_," he agrees unexpectedly. "It's like I've lived to the age of thirty eight to suddenly discover that I have an older brother who is a real pest. And he obviously considers me his reward for having been the younger kid for forty six years."

She wants to say something about cutting Theo some slack, especially considering the nearly impossible way he managed to pull all imaginable strings to get the orange notice issued in record time and the ROS to save their skins, when the truth of what Bruce is saying hits her. Between Alfred, Lucius and Theo, Bruce has earned himself a sort of international adoptive family, in lieu of a father, uncle, and older brother; and she, instead of living out her life as a succession of burglaries and prison stints as she imagined, has seemingly found a place and a life among this oddball bunch, next to a formerly scraggly-looking former billionaire recluse she once stole a string of pearls from.

xxx

The next day he is on the phone as usual, pacing around the terrace, and she is sitting on his "office" couch in the bedroom absent-mindedly shuffling through the papers on the coffee table waiting for him to finish the call so they can have lunch, when an envelope catches her eye. Having been around Theo and the company for weeks by now, she is practically immune to such things, and has nothing to fear under a new identity, but is still slightly unnerved by seeing the globe, sword and scales logo and the Lyon address.

"Take a look at this," she tells Bruce when he gets in. "The Interpol is writing to you personally now."

He quirks an eyebrow, unconcerned. "Open it," he tells her, as he picks up plates to take outside for their upcoming terrace picnic. "Let's see what they want."

"Dear Mr Wainwright," she starts out loud, "we represent the International Criminal Police Organisation, _blah blah blah_… oh wow."

"What?" he calls over from the terrace.

"They're inviting Wainwright Security to complete a prequalification procedure to become a consultant agency, and propose that you write a case study based on our, er, operation for their Global Learning Center and conduct tabletop simulations at their training courses."

"Nice of them," he shoots back, unimpressed. "We don't have time but it's a nice gesture."

Who would have thought that she would be jumping to the Interpol's defence, and to advocate working for them of all things? "I don't know... I like the idea," she insists. "It will be good publicity for the company in the right circles."

"Right now we've got all the publicity we need and then some, and more new business than we can sanely handle." He disappears downstairs to come back with the food and wine in a basket a minute later. "Besides," he continues, setting out the basket contents on the table outside, "can you imagine if there is someone there from Gotham police who knows me?"

It is a valid point, but she is still reluctant to let go of the idea. "You could ask Lucius to step in, he was part of it too."

"He'll never find the time to do it," Bruce argues. "Apart from being the Wayne CEO and pestering us with the partnership agreement, he now has his hands full in Italy."

"Italy?" she echoes, incredulous.

"Yep. He's diversifying into textiles now," he adds wryly, and before she gets completely confused trying to make sense of these developments, he explains. "The ROS people couldn't believe it when I took off my suit jacket and saw that the guards had emptied a couple of clips into my back when they were chasing me. I didn't even feel much of an impact, but the fuckers ruined my suit," he adds with a scowl. "Anyway, when the Carabinieri saw that, they were begging me to tell them what the hell it was I was wearing. And then they brought in their bosses, and I put them in touch with Lucius as it's his Kevlar, really; and when they asked him if they could put in big standing orders to equip themselves and the army and the frontline police with the stuff, he could think of nothing better than talk to Gianfranco. The great irony is, the way the Chinese refurbished the production at Tessuti Varese is ideal for making the colloidal Kevlar we were wearing. Lucius says that all it takes is flushing the old chemicals out of the system, making a couple of minimal tweaks to the equipment settings, adding a silica extraction unit, and putting new raw materials in, it's virtually the same process, as he said. And the moment Gianfranco heard it he forgot everything about opening a restaurant in California and jumped at the idea and signed a memorandum of understanding with Lucius to become an authorised manufacturer, so Lucius is decamping out there for three weeks with a team from Wayne to oversee the conversion. Apart from the money, Gianfranco now sees it as his chance to redeem his father's company, making something that will save lives instead of a chemical weapon. I wouldn't have tagged him for a quixotic romantic earlier, but I suppose I was wrong."

"Reminds me of someone I know who flew a nuke out of a city," she comments matter-of-factly. Truth is, Gianfranco may still have no exact idea of who Bruce is and what he did in his previous life, but it does not stop Bruce from being an inspirational role model.

"Maybe Theo can deal with the Interpol request? He used to work there, after all," she tries again when they are seated on the terrace for lunch, still reluctant for them to turn down the offer.

"Maybe," he replies reluctantly, pouring the wine. "I'm not sure if _I_ can deal with _him _right now, now that he's become a Batman fanboy. Besides," he continues, less sarcastically, "he's too busy working on the draft of our framework partnership agreement with Wayne. He spends most of his time with the lawyers, the latest draft is more than a hundred pages and counting, and Lucius has taken responsibility for it on the Wayne side, handling their lawyers upon my request, but is too tied up with the Kevlar deal; they only discuss comments by phone a couple of times a day. And on top of that we now have the Carabinieri also begging us for drone supplies. We just had Gallitelli, their top commander, visiting today with twenty subordinates. I offered the Carabinieri officers a few samples and a VIP tour of the company as a sort of bribe, trying to get them to keep our names and faces out of the press, but I had no idea Gallitelli himself would show up. They were like kids in a toy shop over the drones, want to get them for their overseas operations and bring in the top Defence Ministry brass for a framework contract, which means we'll need to install another production line, so we have to buy and install the equipment in the next few weeks. That way I may get the Sesto a permanent exemption for driving in Italy, but so much for a quiet summer. I'm trying to get ICQ to pick up the production in the immediate term, but it's better to have a European assembly plant in the mid-term."

"What's ICQ?" she questions.

"Our Brazilian subsidiary. Full name's Industria e Comercio Quimetal, they make high-end CCTV cameras, mostly for the domestic market, there's a lot of demand there. What?" he asks, seeing her shocked look.

"I know this _small world_ stuff and all, but this is ridiculous," she answers incredulously. "I know their business development manager."

Bruce is not so much incredulous as suspicious. "You know Armando Alves?"

"Alves de Mello, yes, you know him too?"

His response is a muttered _oh no_.

"He's the one I stood up in Hong Kong when I flew to meet you over here. We met through a mutual acquaintance at a cocktail reception and sort of bumped into each other a couple of times after that, and then he invited ne to dinner saying he wanted to discuss a business proposition. Judging by your reaction, the _business_ part was just a manner of expression."

Surprisingly, he argues with that... somewhat. "It _would_ have been business, but probably not _only_ business."

"OK, come clean, what do you know about it?" she prompts.

"You pretty much know it already," he admits. "He works as global business development manager at Quimetal, where Wainwright Security holds 51% and a local partner holds the remainder. They've been looking to expand into Asia, which is another huge market for sophisticated specialised cameras; plus this way they wouldn't be competing with us in Europe. Armando wanted to use the Wainwright rep office in Hong Kong to basically to do his job for him, but you've seen how tiny it is, four people who all have their own things to do, and they mostly deal with tracker technology contracts where Quimetal is mostly cameras. The Brazilian CEO and I both thought that it made more sense for Quimetal to do business development directly, so in the first big management meeting that I joined them for once I could walk around and fly overseas, we both told Armando to get his lazy ass to Asia for a few weeks, get a sense of the situation, and find a couple of smart people who could help set up a rep office and help drum up business. I guess you were one of those smart people he must have thought about."

"You're probably right," she ponders. "Now that I think about it, we did have an interesting conversation about surveillance cameras over a few gin and tonics at one point... so if I'd gone to dinner and heard his offer without thinking about taking out the pearls, I'd have likely stayed there and you and I would have never met again."

"Quite the opposite," he says unexpectedly. "We would have met anyway. Maybe a couple of weeks later. Call me a paranoid micromanager," he explains, seeing her puzzled look, "but I would have asked to look at final candidate CVs. And I'd have probably done a search for online info on the candidates, including photos if the CVs didn't have them. Just to see if it wasn't someone who knew me as Wayne... so that I'd know to avoid them. Which, in your case, is about as ironic as it gets."

He _is _paranoid, but in this case, it is reassuring to know. "So you're saying it was our destiny to meet again?" she offers, half taunting.

Surprisingly, he sounds dead serious when he answers. "Looks like it."

"Do you believe in destiny?" she asks, not sure if teasing him about it is a good idea.

"Don't you?" He does not sound completely serious, but certainly more serious than not.

As a practical girl who is usually not that much into philosophy, she just tells him the truth. "Whatever it was, I'm just happy we did meet again, one way or another."

"Fair enough," he agrees, picking up the plates to take downstairs now that they've finished lunch. "Makes two of us."

"Listen, I keep thinking about that Interpol offer," she reminds him when he has come back outside to sit down next to her. "If none of these guys can do it, it sort of leaves the obvious candidate."

"What, me?" He sounds a bit taken aback.

"No, _me_," she corrects him. "I mean, I was there, I saw it all happen, I broke into the safe and whatnot. And unlike you, I'd love to do it."

Her enthusiasm makes him laugh. "It's an interesting career aspiration given your previous ones," he teases.

"Come on, you yourself said that the _CleanSlate _is guaranteed. My records were all in the States anyway, so after they were erased, there's been no way to link me to anything outside Gotham."

"I'm not so much worried about that," he admits, "as I am about them giving you ideas about a career in crime fighting."

It is her turn to laugh now. "Look who's talking."

"I retired," he argues.

"As of ten days ago," she reminds him. And knowing him, there is no telling how permanent this retirement will be.

But he does not give up arguments easily, either. "Don't you think that half a pound of titanium and two fucked-up knees are enough between the two of us? It's bad enough that we'll now be carrying a _his-and-hers_ set of X-ray prints next time we fly somewhere..."

This, from the man who was yesterday defending his right to go heli-skiing; outrageous double-standard treatment. "Get out," she protests, doing her best to sound indignant.

Surprisingly, instead of protesting back he obeys it as a literal order... except that instead of getting out, he actually gets up to go _in_ from the terrace. "It's an unfair advantage," he grumbles. "You're in a position to kick me out just because I can walk away and you can't."

"Maybe it's an unfair advantage," she concedes, "but that's your beloved symmetric warfare for you." At hearing this, he looks undecided for a second before he gets a wicked look on his face. While she is wondering about his intentions, he comes back carrying a towel, walks over to the hot tub, presses a couple of buttons, and proceeds to slowly and very deliberately unbutton his shirt while he waits for the water to warm up. She watches the proceedings with a mixture of enjoyment and envy. "Not fair," she remarks finally, when the water has apparently reached the right temperature for him to get into the tub.

"_This_," he calls over wickedly, "is symmetric warfare. You can't beat me at my own game."

She thinks that she _will_ beat him; the moment her leg is healed, he is paying for this. He just doesn't know it yet.

.

_Symmetric warfare_ is a concept used to define "conventional" war between adversaries of more or less equal strength using similar methods, or put crudely, tit for tat.

Special thanks go to nogood4me for giving me the "Brazilian connection" idea a while back, bringing up the notion of Bruce and Armando actually meeting that ended up morphing into _this_, and for being a great encouragement as a reader throughout. And while I am at it, more thanks go to KLCthebookworm for graciously sharing her encyclopaedic knowledge of the Batman universe :)

See you in the final chapter in a day or two!


	24. Chinese boxes

A huge final **THANK YOU** to all reviewers. You repeatedly made my day with wonderful comments and encouragement, and the least I could do was to write a story that could measure up. It feels strange to be done with it. Apologies in advance for the looong footnote bumping up the word count; the chapter is actually relatively short at 2.5K.

Not a moment too soon :P I've put together a title header; was too busy writing before. Can't post it into the text, but here is the link. (http) i45*tinypic*com/2n6sm6h*jpg

I also made one for Catching Up; I am less than thrilled with it but it'll do for now: (http) i47*tinypic*com/2yza2rp*jpg

Also, I don't expect anyone to understand the safecracking terminology in this chapter ;) but if you ever feel like cracking a dial-lock safe, the following may come in handy ;) Pretty tech-heavy, be warned. (http www) crypto*com/papers/safelocks*pdf

.

It looks like she is about to get back to work sooner than she thought. He calls her from the office at about ten the next day to ask if she was up for a safecracking job. Usually when he is away from the villa, he does not call her before noon, in case she is sleeping late, but this morning he saw her stir awake when he got up and sit moping around in bed after he had brought her breakfast; now that she has finished the navigation rules and Falcon manual, and he has talked her out of reading _The Fundamentals of Options and Futures_, she is struggling to find something to keep her busy.

"If you're still as bored as you were this morning," he tells her, "I can bring you something to do. We have an idiot of a client who bought himself a safe with a Group 1 lock," he explains, referring to the top-of-the-line, high-security kind, "and fucked up setting the lock combination. After he put in a stack of documents, mind you. So now he's left with time-sensitive contracts inside a safe he can't open, the safe's too expensive to cut open or drill through, and there's the danger that a spark could ignite the paper, so he's been begging us to open it for him. Has sent it to us from Zurich in a truck, as a matter of fact. Now if you don't feel like doing it, Frederick from the testing team can have a go at it – "

She is not so much dismissive of the other man's skills as she is anxious not to have this golden opportunity of cracking a Group 1 safe again slip by. Treasures like that don't crop up often. "_Of course_ I feel like doing it," she insists. "When can you come pick me up?"

"There's no need for you to come to the office," he assures her instead. "I'll have it brought to you."

Half an hour later, he is back at the villa directing four workers to the huge sitting room downstairs. She watches from the terrace as the men carefully manoeuvre a super heavy duty rolling cargo platform next to the similarly heavy truck at the end of the villa driveway before the attached crane picks up what looks like a miniature elevator and, straining with the weight, lowers it on top of the platform. Next, the men roll over the platform into the lobby – luckily, the villa entrance is level with the driveway, but for some reason they still leave a shallow industrial-looking steel ramp just outside the main door – and she can practically feel the floor shudder as the safe moves into the sitting room. Another quarter of an hour later, when they have left and Bruce has carried her downstairs, she is admiring the safe and scowling slightly at the task ahead of her.

It is, indeed, a top-of-the-line model, a formidable artefact of brushed steel and gleaming controls. The trouble is, this beauty comes complete with a beast of a Kaba-Ilco rotary dial lock. And if she remembers right, instead of the three, maximum four wheels on the usual Group 2 models, this one has five, making it harder to discern the code by pure manipulation, which seems like her only choice considering what Bruce said earlier about the client not wanting to damage the safe and its flammable contents. Leaving aside the crude cutting torch option, she can't even risk drilling it to insert a scope that would dramatically cut the time needed to complete the task; she knows that the hardplate beneath the steel lining the sides of the safe is so thick and durable that any drill needed to penetrate _that_ is bound to produce sparks. All she has at her disposal is paper and a pencil to map the wheels on a contact point graph, and a spare stethoscope from among the tools of her trade that she did not take into the office.

"I could use the autodialer or the _SoftDrill_", she suggests, referring to the transducer pack that is not really a drill, just a sophisticated electronic gadget that takes the pain out of manipulating locks. "But I'd need to go into the office to pick them up."

Bruce returns her look with one that smacks of a transparent challenge. "I'll bring them for you if you give up on opening it by touch," he promises. Like hell she is giving up now.

"I think I'll manage," she mutters, unwilling to yield.

"Just tell me if you change your mind," he prompts her. Not a chance.

After that, she is barely aware of the hours passing, consumed by the challenge. This is not normally something that is done on this kind of safe; it is too complex and in fact has a 20-hour burglary resistance rating. The best hope of opening it sooner should be by drilling, and in most situations the safecracker, be it a burglar or a security professional, would do just that, or else they'd go for the slow-but-sure _SoftDrill _solution; but even if what she is doing is somewhat impractical, it is, she has to admit, engrossing. She sits in front of the safe and completely forgets about Bruce on the sofa a few feet away from her, swamped in a sea of paper between the latest draft of the Wayne Enterprises framework partnership agreement, the Italian Carabinieri letter of intent, and the Interpol prequalification document package now that he has yielded to her persuasion and agreed to let her design and run the simulation training course, all of which he has promised to review asap. All she is aware of is the fluid movement of her own hand turning the dial, the slow and steady creep of the digits against the marks she has made on the adhesive paper circle around it, feeling the wheels picking up one by one and the cam drive pin clicking against the fly, the minute falling and rising of the lever as the cam gate moves under... poetry in motion, even if it is a bitch of a challenge. Knowing the lock to be a Kaba-Ilco, she knows its contact region positions, thus eliminating at least some of the combinations where the values would fall too close to the contact region forbidden zones – and she tries to visualise the lock mechanism to "see" the position of the wheels, figure out the cam gate contact points and read the dial position with the maximum precision, parking the wheels at the low points to re-map combinations and meticulously recording her findings on the contact point graph. She tells Bruce that she wants to skip lunch, leaving him to gnaw on an old sandwich, and does not even notice it when he falls asleep on the vast sofa, exhausted by the paperwork, so she is surprised to see him jump up when she finally cracks the safe almost eight hours later, still well ahead of the 20-hour rating, with a near-orgasmic feeling and a triumphant "YES!"

Except that the sight that greets her inside is enough to make her both very angry and perversely happy. Nestled snugly inside the steel contraption is another rotary dial safe.

She turns an accusing glare on Bruce. "This isn't a client." The effect, she suspects, is rather spoiled by the fact that she can't help grinning as soon as she has said it, but still, it is one hell of a practical joke to play on her.

"Probably not," he admits, as if wondering.

The deadliest weapon at her disposal happens to be a plastic hairclip holding her ponytail; but her aim is good enough so that it hits the side of his head before he can avoid it. But all it makes him do is laugh out loud at her predicament.

"Have you developed a nostalgic fondness for Chinese boxes?" she taunts him.

"I guess you could say that," he concedes, before explaining. "It was the easiest way to bring the maximum amount of safe here while taking up the minimum amount of space in transit. If I'd just brought _one_ safe, you'd have nothing to keep you entertained by now. You looked like you were getting bored, and I promise that futures and options textbook would have driven you up a wall."

"And what about the time-sensitive papers inside?" she reminds him of the complicated subterfuge.

He has the decency to look self-conscious. "Admit it, if you could attack this one with the tools, you'd have opened it in even less time, and what would the fun be in that?" She has to give it to him, there is a point in what he is saying.

"How many?" she asks. Given what he just said, she suspects that the _Chinese boxes_ don't end here.

Sure enough, they don't. "About half a dozen," he says, absent-mindedly.

"And the rest are all dial lock too, right?" She knows the answer already.

"I think so." For someone with a photographic memory to rival and exceed her own, Bruce has suddenly become remarkably forgetful.

"That's torture," she accuses him mockingly.

"That's practice," he shoots back, undaunted. "Besides, you don't have to open them all at once."

"You know I can't resist the temptation."

"You're trying to make me jealous of a piece of hardware," he grumbles.

"Me? Trying?" she injects her voice with as close a shot at righteous indignation as her enjoyment will allow. "You seem to be _actively seeking out_ people and pieces of hardware to be jealous of. At this rate you'll soon be jealous of the kitchen sink."

"I'm pretty relaxed about the kitchen sink," he parries. "There's nothing to crack in it."

xxx

She ends up enjoying this challenge; to Bruce's credit, he has picked an assortment of safes with really tricky locks. She does not recognise the make of the second safe; judging by the contact region positions on the cam wheel, it has an S&G lock with four wheels, but is still an uphill battle as it is packed with crack-resistant features: a low dialling tolerance, a couple of false gates, and nylon wheels instead of metal ones for smoother movement. This time it comes as no surprise when she opens it two and a half hours later to find a third one; Bruce has to go outside and fetch the steel ramp – now she finally knows why the workers left it there – to slide the third one out onto the floor so that she can have full access to the lock dial.

"You're in too much of a hurry," he tells her when she immediately slides down to the floor herself to work on it. "And if you say you're going to skip dinner as well, I'll carry you upstairs and not bring you back until tomorrow."

She wonders if the way she looks now is not unlike that of the proverbial baby that has candy taken from it; but she cannot help it. "OK, here's a deal for you," she offers. "You order dinner, I keep going until it's here and then I stop and we eat it together."

"Sounds good," he admits, flipping through a stack of takeaway menus on the side table. "You sure you can't be persuaded to leave the rest until morning?"

"No way. I'm gonna finish them before bedtime," she insists. How many more safes can there be left, really?

"So much for keeping you busy for longer," he comments wryly.

After dinner – Bruce cunningly ordered Chinese _to go with the theme_ – two more safes later and close to midnight, she gets to what must be the last one. In all her considerable history of encounters with safes, she has never come across a rotary dial one less than a cubic foot in size, and the fifth one is cutting it close. It is so compact and relatively lightweight that Bruce can lift it in his hands and set it on the side table for her to tweak open without the table showing much stress from the weight. It is sturdy wood, true, but the safe can't be more than twenty pounds.

"There's no way you could have found a dial lock safe to fit inside this one." It isn't even a question.

"You never know," is the cryptic answer. Having sufficiently confused her with it, he resumes his place at the other end of the sofa, pen in hand and partnership agreement draft in his lap.

Half an hour later, when the door silently swings open, she is ready to triumphantly announce that her hunch was right... when the quick look inside, just to be sure that it is, in fact, empty, makes her forget to breathe.

She was too carried away by the thrill of the chase to allow for the possibility of a third option other than an empty space, or another safe. But here it is; sitting innocently just inside the steel cube is a tiny square black velvet thing, not more than two inches across and with a domed lid that leaves little doubt as to its contents. And all she can do is sit and stare, mesmerised, feeling her throat catch and the tears well up in her eyes, cursing her stupidity at her own reaction. The man has an uncanny ability to reduce her to tears. Mostly tears of joy, she'll give him that; but still.

"Are you going to open it?" She did not even notice him walking up to her. And she is in no state to answer. She manages a nod, but still does not trust herself to speak.

"Since you said you like a _smaller kind of box_, I thought I'd get you one," he continues. "But I forgot that for a jewel thief, you have a rare aversion to looking inside jewellery cases."

"I think I know what's in it," she says finally, barely above a breath.

It is when he looks at her with just the tiniest flicker of insecurity, his dark green eyes almost black in the soft light, that she almost breaks down crying again; there are definitely a couple of tears sliding down her cheeks, though neither of them really notices.

"I think you do," he admits. "But you'd better take a look. Maybe you won't like it."

She pulls him down on the sofa next to her, and closer still until their foreheads touch. "Maybe I'll _hate_ it," she whispers against his lips. She really, _really_ doubts it. "It won't change my answer."

.

_fin_

.

Selina may not have been curious to see her engagement ring, but the readers might be. The so-called Shawish ring weighs 150 carats and costs 70 million dollars, but I figure Bruce only plans to get married once and has enough money stashed away... I mean, how else does an ex-billionaire impress a future wife who used to be Gotham City's best jewel thief, if not with the ultimate engagement ring cut out of an entire diamond? (http www) shawish-jewellery*com/diamondring*html

I realise that I am a massive letdown on the celebratory sex, but I am offering a bribe, in three words, _Metroland_ and _Laurel Canyon_, as in, two of Christian Bale's early films. If you have not seen them, find them. The first of these has him having more sex than he does in all his other films put together... with the exception of the second of these ;) And shall we say, he appears in _very considerable_ states of undress in both :P

.

Thank you again, everyone who stuck through with this. It has been great fun to write, and I hope it has also been fun to read. I would love to hear from you, but can't insist.

I had a long endnote typed up for a while explaining how I had given this couple my best and was leaving them to enjoy life.

It was not meant to be.

Not the _enjoying life_ part, but the_ leaving them_ part. The guilty party knows who they are ;) – and other people's wonderful Selina/Bruce fic will have to remain unread for two or three more weeks.

Once I was done with my precious Ch 19 of Boxes, I typed up the summary for a mini-sequel… if a 25K estimate qualifies as a mini. But it won't be like Boxes, where my initial guess of 25K ended up being 80. Even less of a relationship development story (by then, a year on from the end of Boxes, they'll be an established couple with a relatively stable dynamic) and more of a travelogue loosely strung together by a notional plot, a kind of Bond ultra lite, more romp than drama, more Ocean's Eleven than Nolan. The fluff-to-plot ratio is going to be more in favour of the former, of which I am duly ashamed. But I suppose it'll bring a sort of symmetry, turning the mismatched lot of Catching Up and Boxes into a middle-heavy trilogy. If you are not yet tired of this version of them, I look forward to seeing you in the final instalment that will go under the name of _Plus ça Change_; I'll post the first chapter now and the rest as I write. If you have any specific plot requests other than smut and babies (sorry, can't do either!), I'll be happy to see what I can do. I know some of you would like to see more of Alfred; it could be tricky considering his age (I use the actors' real ages except for Lucius, who I pretend is not 75 ;) ) and de facto retirement, but I'll try to at least get them to talk again.

I will, however, include four sentences from my original endnote as a still-valid blanket caveat.

"_They will undoubtedly run into tricky situations from time to time, but probably few dramatic enough to measure up to this one, or else they would end up having Terminator-like metal skeletons. And they will have lots of fun in bed (and in the hot tub, and elsewhere) but I am both subpar at and wary of writing porn… given the former, the latter is likely a blessing. And not being a weddings-and-babies sort of girl (what, surprised? :P ) I leave it up to them to decide on all that. I have been their travel agent and munitions expert for six weeks; I draw the line at being a wedding planner_."

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As the _really_ last endnote here, and a final testament to my control freakery when writing this, here is a timeline of events from Selina's phone call from Hong Kong to Lugano in _Catching Up_ to this point. You may appreciate my restraint in not throwing in my schematic of the Tessuti Varese premises while I'm at it; even I could see that posting it would have been a bit excessive. The plot takes two months; I picked May 2 somewhat arbitrarily, but I did see it as beginning in early May and ending in early July. Plus I had them planning to see Alfred in "early June" some thirty-five days later, which could not be too close to June 2, a national holiday that usually means a long weekend and bigger crowds (which both they and Alfred would know of and try to avoid) and did not want Bruce's de facto proposal to coincide with the US Independence Day… but I digress.

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**Master timeline**

t" = Selina discovers the pearls and flies out of Hong Kong (beginning of May, e.g. May 2)

t"+1 Selina flies into Zurich for the dinner date

t"+2 the next afternoon – villa, the chase, shopping, dinner, and the movie – _start of Chinese Boxes_

t"+5 meeting with Theo; Selina starts working with Wainwright Security

t"+20 they decide on the China trip

t"+22 go to China

t"+23 arrive Beijing-Xilihot

t"+24 stay around Xilihot

t"+25 go to Yinchuan

t"+26 go to Turpan

t"+27 stay around Turpan

t"+28 go to Xining

t"+29 sightseeing around Xining and the landing incident

t"+30 go to Lhasa

t"+31 return Lhasa-Beijing and fly to Hong Kong

t"+32 = **t** they come back to Lugano (e.g. June 4) and go to Florence

t+5 see Alfred

t+6 come back to Lugano

t+7 get the Giacomo Varese death news (killed t+5), talk to Theo, and leave for Prato

t+8 Varese's funeral, go to meet Gianfranco, get into the hospital, talk to the doctor, go back to Lugano

t+9 start digging for ownership and financial info on Tessuti Varese

t+10 keep digging for info and put the picture together; Bruce decides to go to Liguria

t+11 arrive in Liguria, Bruce sticks the tags onto yarn containers and goes on recon to Prato late at night

t+14 they track the containers to Tessuti Varese, call Gianfranco and meet with him in the evening

t+15 return to Lugano, mission prep and evening meeting with Lucius in Aviano

t+16 leave Lugano and arrive in Prato; first meeting at Tessuti Varese and intel gathering overnight

t+17 negotiations at Tessuti Varese and theft of USB stick overnight

t+18 final day and the confrontation

t+19 Selina wakes up in hospital

t+21 they leave for Lugano

t+25 Alfred's call; Selina gets the chocolates and the pearls back

t+26 call from Lucius about the Wayne-Wainwright takeover threat

t+27 the Interpol "job offer" letter

t+28 Selina cracks the safe (e.g. July 2)

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	25. postscript: picspam link

This is not a new chapter.

Apologies for accidentally misleading anyone. The picspam linked below, like the two I've now linked at the end of _Catching Up_, covers the places mentioned in this story – with the notable exceptions of China and Hong Kong, as I stick to posting pictures I took and I haven't been there. So instead, here are various Italian towns_._ I have enabled anonymous comments in case you check these out and want to comment or ask a question without an LJ account. Commenting is entirely optional, though much appreciated.

(http) 01cheers*livejournal*com/6290*html


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